How to avoid the ‘AWS Flexibility Tax’ with CloudKeeper?

In today's digital age, businesses worldwide are riding the wave of cloud technology, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) leading the charge. The magic of AWS lies not just in its power to fuel innovation, speed, and scalability. It's also in its promise of freedom from the constraints of long-term commitments, be it data-center hardware or software architecture choices. It also helps companies to free up their resources, which could be focused on new innovations and pushing their boundaries.

However, there is a growing concern among businesses regarding cloud cost optimization. When companies are operating at scale, the cost of the cloud could result in a staggeringly high infrastructure bill, pushing executive leadership across organizations to even think of drastic measures like complete repatriation to on-premise data centers.

The Price of Freedom and Flexibility

Typically, the narrative of ‘cloud is great’ runs on the superpower of flexibility. With cloud service providers like AWS, the principal benefits that businesses expect to derive are on-demand capacity, access to new geographies, and a large number of service types available for a streamlined developer experience. However, the price of an on-demand EC2 instance could be 200% to 300% higher than that of the same EC2 instance with a 3-year commitment. This additional tax is levied especially on compute resources which typically account for the largest slice of the AWS cost pie, which can add up continuously without proper AWS cost reduction practices.

We have taken the liberty to fondly name this the 'AWS Flexibility Tax'.

When businesses scale, this additional price tag on ‘freedom’ to spin up resources as and when needed could eat into the total revenues and even be translated into unlocked market capitalization. Even with committed-spend programs, it is not easy to tackle this challenge unless a company achieves 100% accuracy on their future usage predictions with the cloud FinOps tools. In a recent study, most companies reported that they exceeded their committed spend, switching them over to buying resources on-demand, incurring additional expenses and burning a hole in their pockets.

The Silver Lining

With all these challenges around aws cost reduction and parallelly ensuring flexibility, the cloud cost optimization dilemma might look like a dark and deep abyss, which only gets scarier as organizations mature. However, that’s not always the case. Operational flexibility need not be achieved at a far too higher price.

Here's the silver lining: you can dodge this Flexibility Tax, continue to reap the full benefits of AWS, and you can do it all with a bit of help from your friend - CloudKeeper.

CloudKeeper offers a comprehensive suite of AWS FinOps & Cost Optimization solutions tailored to meet the unique needs of different customer segments. With CloudKeeper by your side, be rest assured that cloud cost will remain a first-class metric of business performance, and you will achieve most, if not all, of your cloud cost optimization objectives.

The top 3 benefits that CloudKeeper provides are:

• RI like pricing on compute resources

  While Reserved Instances cost significantly less than On-Demand Instances, it is often a trade-off between flexibility and cost. In exchange for reduced costs, organizations must agree to large-volume and long-term commitments.

  The most compelling benefit of CloudKeeper is that you get RI-like pricing on compute resources without getting into any long-term commitments of any kind. CloudKeeper does the heavy lifting associated with making RI commitments so that you can continue to use all your compute resources with 100% flexibility without any lock-in. Also, CloudKeeper provides a 100% buy-back guarantee in case of any unused commitments.

• Advanced Analytics, Reports & Recommendations around Cost optimization

  With their proprietary AWS Cost Analytics Platform, CloudKeeper gives you access to real-time, in-depth cloud cost insights at the individual resource level. The platform also offers periodic spend trends and forecasts, a comprehensive dashboard with cloud cost optimization recommendations, insights into RI and Savings Plan utilization, and more, with no access requirements to your AWS account.

• FinOps Consulting & Support

  Backed by a team of 300+ AWS Certified Cloud Experts, CloudKeeper offers you end-to-end cloud FinOps support to optimize your entire infrastructure. This includes periodic reviews of your architectural designs, consulting and guidance for adopting new services or at the occurrence of any outages/incidents, business reviews, 24x7 support, and anything and everything that would help you deliver better AWS cost reduction.

The Power of Collaborations

With a Cloud FinOps Partner like CloudKeeper, you can focus on your journey of expanding and enhancing your business while ensuring that cloud cost optimization never takes a back seat. An AWS Premier Consulting Partner since 2013 that has delivered $100Mn+ in cloud savings to 300+ customers across the world, CloudKeeper is an easy choice for businesses who would never want to compromise on cloud performance and scalability while pulling the leash on cloud costs.

In essence, cloud is the perfect choice for innovation, agility, and business expansion. Expert FinOps solution providers like CloudKeeper can help you navigate the cloud cost maze easily without compromising on performance and flexibility. They assist you in effectively managing your cloud infrastructure while helping you tackle the burdensome 'AWS Flexibility Tax,' by bringing in optimization, optimization, and more optimization!

Achieve all your cloud cost optimization goals with CloudKeeper by your side.

Talk to our experts to learn more.