Overview of Cloud Cost Requirement Analysis
Implementing cloud cost planning first requires a comprehensive understanding of cloud cost requirements. In the planning phase, by conducting a requirement analysis of cloud costs, ensure that the business requirements of relevant personnel are identified and tracked. Take targeted measures during the planning and execution stage to optimize resource utilization and achieve cost visibility, control, and sustainable operation within the organization.
Enterprise customers primarily collect cloud cost requirements from the following aspects:
Business geography
Compliance
Security
Business continuity and stability
Technical team management
Automation and standardization
Cost optimization goals
Cost Requirements Analysis
Business Geography
When adopting the cloud for globally multinational enterprises, selecting one or multiple cloud regions is an important decision-making process that involves various aspects of cost requirements. When creating or purchasing Alibaba Cloud resources, you need to select a deployment region, and the region cannot be changed once the resource is created or purchased. When selecting a region, you need to consider: select a nearby region if it needs to be connected to the enterprise's own IDC; or the region where the business end customers are located. For example, if an Asian company has warehouses in both local and Shanghai, the warehouse management system should be deployed in the Alibaba Cloud Shanghai region based on the principle of proximity. At the same time, the selection of regions should also consider the potential costs of network dedicated lines and data transmission between regions.
Compliance
Enterprises face external compliance requirements for their information systems on the cloud, such as Level 2 and 3 cyber security protection regulations. At the same time, when cloud resources reach a certain scale, internal baselines for compliance control will be established to meet the requirements of self-management efficiency and security compliance, including recording operation logs and configuration change logs of cloud resources. It also depends on the continuous monitoring and automatic alert capabilities provided by the cloud platform to achieve autonomous compliance supervision. Enterprise-level customers perform operations audit and configuration audit on cloud resources, involving services such as configuration audit, operation audit, function compute, SLS, and OSS. Logs of operational auditing are delivered to the corresponding SLS or OSS in the region. Different storage fees will be incurred depending on the specific volume of enterprise logs.
Security
Security is the most important and essential requirement for enterprises in choosing infrastructure and is also an important factor affecting costs. Security measures can protect an organization's important data and prevent data and information leakage. At the same time, security defense functions ensure the integrity and availability of business and prevent external attacks and abuse of systems. Including security requirements as part of cloud cost analysis involves various aspects, such as data center security, network security, data security, identity security, and security defense system. For example, identity authentication, MFA, and these options will increase costs. Cloud security group, cloud firewall, Anti-DDoS, and application security products involved in cloud infrastructure design will also increase costs. In addition, monitoring and operating security to deal with complex security environments is also an important security consideration. Alibaba Cloud Security Center provides excellent enterprise-level security monitoring and operational capabilities. Log storage and security audits are also necessaryto meet security and regulatory requirements. Data backup is another necessary operation to meet security requirements. According to compliance with data security, enterprises may increase the frequency of data backup. The effectiveness of the backup tool, data storage, and bandwidth would affect costs. For security considerations, please refer to the Security pillar.
Business Stability and Continuity
Enterprise-level applications, whether to serve internal users or external customers, have Service Level Agreement (SLA) that must be met. Depending on the requirements for business stability and continuity, high availability and disaster recovery strategies need to be created. For availability requirements, the overall Service Level Agreement (SLA), Recovery Time Objective (RTO), and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) may redefine the cloud infrastructure and product selection. For example, an enterprise may choose to host applications across regions. This choice comes at a higher cost compared to hosting applications in a single region but supports high availability. Generally, if the cost of high availability exceeds the cost of application downtime, it indicates that the high availability strategy may be over-designed. Conversely, if the cost of high availability is lower than the cost of reasonable downtime, more investment may be required. Assuming that the cost of application downtime is relatively low, cost savings can be achieved by recovering from backup and disaster recovery processes. If the cost of application downtime per hour is significant, more investment should be made in service availability and disaster recovery. The trade-off needs to consider service provisioning, availability requirements, and the organization's response to risks. Based on the availability and lifecycle of applications, as well as the characteristics of the service, selecting the appropriate instance can greatly improve the utilization and management cost of cloud products. For example:
Instance selection
Understanding the key features of instance types and selecting the most suitable ECS instance type can improve resource utilization and save costs. The decision should take into account factors such as performance, price, and workload. Based on business scenarios and configuration divisions such as vCPUs, memory, network performance, and storage throughput, Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS) provides various instance families. Low-configuration resources can be used initially, and after evaluating the workload, the configuration can be upgraded or reduced for resources with low utilization.
Billing modes selection
Selecting the appropriate billing method based on business characteristics is the most direct way to optimize costs. From a payment perspective, stable business resources used for long-term needs can be supported by choosing cost-effective subscription plans. For business resources with clear usage cycles and stateful requirements, more flexible and higher-cost pay-as-you-go resources can be selected. Pay-as-you-go resources can be stopped without charge to preserve data and enable quick startup. For long-term operation needs, switch to prepaid billing mode. Stateless and fault-tolerant services can be supported by cost-effective preemptible instances.
Intermittent computing requirements and event-driven computing requirements can also use Alibaba Cloud Function Compute. For example, listening to changes in data files stored triggers one-time computing tasks, etc. Enterprises do not need to purchase and manage server infrastructure, and Function Compute can prepare computing resources to run tasks elastically and reliably, and provide functions such as log query, performance monitoring, and alerting.
Resilient architecture design
When designing architecture, establish an elastic and scalable architecture based on the application's lifecycle. Increase deployment nodes through the elastic mechanism of computing resources during business peak periods and reduce cloud resources during business off-peak periods to greatly improve resource utilization and maximize cost efficiency.
Conduct surveys on the business department's future plans, clarify and list resource specifications and quantities suitable for the business, and leave a certain amount of redundancy.
Technical Team Management
Allow technical personnel and partners to better learn and use Alibaba Cloud and master the latest cloud management skills. Or choosing Alibaba Cloud's enterprise ticket service, enterprise support plan service, expert services, and learning resources from Alibaba Cloud Academy.
Ticket Service: Offer 24x7 online support service, with experts available online to answer technical questions.
Enterprise Support Plan: In addition to basic after-sales support, for customers with complex business systems or higher service requirements, Alibaba Cloud provides various enterprise support plan services to gain speedy ticket responses, exclusive technical support channels, technical service managers, and other exclusive support.
Enterprise Value-Added Services: Provide professional services throughout the full lifecycle to meet various service needs in different scenarios, including pre-cloud consulting, migration and deployment during cloud transformation, and post-cloud operation, management and optimization.
Professional Training Solutions: Offer professional cooperation programs and training systems to meet digital transformation needs of industry customers and training needs of talent in colleges and universities. Based on Alibaba Cloud's experience in industry digital practices and exploration in cutting-edge fields such as cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, and cloud-native, professional training empowers the industry's digital transformation, connects with Alibaba's ecosystem, breakthrough shortcoming and bottleneck constraints in development transformation, and helps enterprises achieve leaps in development.
Automation and Standardization
Define the process of provisioning and deploying cloud resources through standardized processes and tools, including account management, cloud resource management, access settings, event response, and disaster recovery. Standardized processes and tools can help enterprises save cloud cost. However, implementing standardization may reveal the need for additional development costs. For example, use the cloud command-line interface and Terraform to define IT infrastructure:
Automated Infrastructure Management: Terraform can create templates for configuration files to define, provision, and configure ECS resources in a repeatable and predictable way, reducing deployment and management errors caused by human factors. By using the same template to deploy, you can create the same development, testing, and production environments.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) allows resources to be managed and maintained using code. It allows the state of the infrastructure to be preserved, enabling enterprises to track changes made to different components in the system (Infrastructure as Code) and share these configurations with others.
On-demand creation of development and deployment environments can reduce costs and increase portability.
Alternatively, you can use the visual application creation tool Cloud Authoring and Delivery Tool (CADT) to quickly generate architecture on the cloud. CADT provides a rich collection of pre-designed templates and also supports self-service drag-and-drop, significantly reducing the difficulty and time of managing applications on the cloud.
Cost Optimization Goals
At different stages of enterprise and organizational development, the cost accounting department will impose different cost requirements on cloud adoption. For example, annual cloud cost constraints or significantly increasing cloud resource usage while cloud resource costs increase slowly (non-linear to resource usage). This requirement is not only for cloud vendors to reduce costs through their own technological iterations but also for the requirements for the enterprise IT system's technological evolution. The goal of cost optimization can also be to reduce cloud resource usage by 10% while keeping existing business unchanged. These cost management and optimization goals need to be identified, managed in the planning stage, and implemented in the execution stage. In the planning stage, enterprise needs to pay attention to the latest development trends in cloud computing technologies and leverage technology dividends for cost optimization. With the development of cloud computing, new technologies, products, and tools will continue to appear, often bringing performance or efficiency improvements and thereby improving the cost-effectiveness and management efficiency of cloud adoption. For example, upgrades to servers, databases, and the launch of R&D efficiency platforms can improve cloud effectiveness by adapting to their own business development.
Best Practices
Alibaba Cloud provides the following practical recommendations for requirement analysis:
In order to align with business objectives, relevant stakeholders of the enterprise must define requirements.
Good practice:
Enterprises need to define IT requirements internally, correctly collect and track requirements, and provide feedback on the results of the implementation. Thus, a complete and long-term effective requirement collection method and path can be found.
Bad practice:
Relying entirely on the provider or letting the provider define the cloud resources without giving the corresponding guidance and constraints. This will lead to abnormally complex cloud governance work in the later stages.
Enterprises need to collect security requirements and implement them during IT implementation.
Good practice:
Analyze business security requirements and enterprise security requirements while planning business requirements.
Bad practice:
Ignore security requirements or only deploy security products after the IT system is deployed. This may cause greater losses to security and stability before the deployment of security products.
Enterprises need to create high availability and disaster recovery strategies based on service level agreements.
It is necessary to invest in automation and standardization but also consider practical situations and business requirements to avoid excessive implementation.