Welcome to the fourth edition of our Cloud Cost Optimization newsletter! In this edition, we’ll focus on taking advantage of reserved instances and the concept of pre-FinOps.

Reserved instances are a type of cloud computing instance that allows you to reserve capacity for a period of time, typically one to three years. By committing to using this capacity, you can save significantly on your cloud costs compared to on-demand instances.

To take advantage of reserved instances, you’ll need to carefully review your usage patterns to determine which instances you will need over the long term. You’ll also need to consider the trade-offs between cost savings and flexibility.

Keep in mind that reserved instances are best suited for workloads that are consistent and predictable over a period of time. You may be better off using on-demand or spot instances if your workload is variable or unpredictable.

By strategically using reserved instances, you can save significantly on your cloud costs while meeting your workload demands.

Migrating to the cloud can be a great way to optimize costs for your business, but it requires careful planning and execution to ensure you are getting the most out of your cloud investment. We are seeing an increasing number of companies moving to the cloud and only understanding the cost impacts once they are migrated, and the cloud costs start to increase.

To combat this growing issue, we are working on a concept of pre-FinOps to ensure that as you move into the cloud, you land your workload in the right provider and the best service with the most appropriate purchase option, e.g. Reserved Instances.

Some of the strategies we are looking to incorporate into this new cloud adoption framework include the following:

1. Analyze your existing application and infrastructure costs: Before you start migrating to the cloud, you must clearly understand your current infrastructure costs. This will help you identify areas where you can save money by moving to the cloud.
2. Choose the right cloud provider: We are seeing providers now focusing on delivering vertical and horizontal solutions, maybe by industry or business process of the technical platform. These new offerings will not only provide a cost step change, but they will also deliver greater performance and reliability. This goes beyond just selecting the provider based on the price of their specific infrastructure offering and comparing.

We will be going into more detail about our pre-FinOps cloud adoption framework in the near future.