The current challenge: cloud cost saving

Cloud computing has transformed the way in which businesses and organizations operate. Who remembers that time when online activities revolved around personal computing? Cloud computing allows you to consume IT resources as a utility, and the implementation has made significant cost reductions in IT. The challenge now is cost saving in the cloud.

Strategies for the reduction of cloud costs are everywhere, and some of them actually complement one another: from hiring an official cost engineer, to deeply searching for cloud provider discounts, creating hybrid clouds, looking for companies specialized in data storage at a low price, etc. 

In this article we want to tell you about a very specific solution that besides reducing your cloud provider bill significantly, it’s easy and quick to implement. We’re talking about placing a CDN in front of your cloud, a strategy that also brings a lot of additional advantages. But before we talk about them, let us ask you a few questions. 

TRAFFIC, THE KEY TO CLOUD COST SAVING

Did you know that the most expensive element of a cloud provider is traffic? Have a look at your bill and check how much you pay per transferred GB. Besides, it’s quite possible that you’re paying for different values according to the origin of that traffic. Traffic from Europe and USA is probably the cheapest, but you’ll see that the cost increases when it comes from Latin America, or any other region outside of Europe/USA.

Do you pay per request? If you have a web cache layer, are you paying after a certain number of invalidations? How are outbound transfers billed? This is not only referred to what users spend visiting your website. In Amazon’s AWS cloud, for example, making requests to services in its cloud using public APIs, can generate outbound traffic. Generally, anything leaving an Internet Gateway in this provider is billed as outbound traffic. 

All of these elements that we’ve mentioned significantly increase the bill you get each month from your cloud provider. 

REDUCE THE PRICE YOU PAY FOR YOUR TRAFFIC

The price reduction for your traffic is a good way of saving on cloud costs. To reduce that part of the bill, the solution is to place a CDN (content delivery network) in front of your cloud, so that the users connect to the CDN and not the cloud provider. That way, the price that you pay for your traffic is determined by the CDN, not the provider. 

And what about all the cloud services you have with your cloud provider? Don’t worry! We’re not saying that you need to drop your provider. Putting a CDN in front of the cloud doesn’t mean that you’re leaving your cloud environment, not if said CDN (such as Transparent Edge’s CDN), can be integrated with third parties.

THE KEY IS IN THE PRICE PER GB

Before we asked you to have a look at your bill, and we were telling you how it usually becomes more expensive, given the different origins of the traffic, the charge per request, etc. For the use of a CDN in front of the cloud to succeed in reducing the costs, you need to consider these details: 

• The price per transferred GB has to be very competitive
• That price should be consistent: you should pay the same regardless of where your traffic comes from: the USA, Europe, LATAM, Asia, Africa or Oceania. 
• You shouldn’t be charged for requests, only for transferred GB
• Avoid paying double: for both inbound and outbound traffic
• Invalidations shouldn’t incur additional costs

This can save you up to 50% on what you spend due to traffic, paying your cloud provider. Besides, you will have all of the advantages of having a next-generation CDN. In the case of our CDN, you can add key features at no extra cost (streaming logs, tags invalidations, ESI support, protocol downgrade, etc.) and fast and real support. 

A QUICK SOLUTION WITH NO SERVICE INTERRUPTION

The implementation of this solution for cloud cost savings is a simple and quick process, at least with Transparent Edge. It will not require interrupting your service nor losing important data. First, the configuration: it can be done by your technology team, or we do it at no extra cost. Afterwards, you only need to make a DNS change, to place our next-generation CDN in front of the cloud. There’s very little time required to do this. And you don’t need to modify any other details in your current infrastructure.