It planning: Do companies spend money on cloud services?

Experts say it is one of the most challenging tasks for companies to deploy cloud strategies to understand how much cloud services they need and what types of cloud services they need, and most companies are not doing it well.

Cloudyn Company (the company's http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/13960.html ">saas application is used to help companies monitor their cloud usage and provide adjustment recommendations) President Sharon "The whole premise of the cloud strategy should be to get it executives to save something, but that's not what people do, and many companies are overly configurable, which leads to excess spending," says Wagner. ”

Experts agree with him, "I think this is a problem that almost everyone can face," said Paul Bums, an independent analyst at Neovise, who believes that the spending on cloud services is a bit of a misnomer and that many consumers think they're paying for the cloud resources they use, actually, The user is paying a certain amount of calculation or storage. Whether they use it or not, it all depends on them.

"Almost every customer may have this problem," said James Staten, vice president and chief analyst at Forrester Company, "some customers ' Amazing ' fees have been used so they can handle it well, but in fact, if customers can take a closer look at their actual use, they will be able to save a cost. ”

So how do we solve the problem of resource overallocations? Staten says companies can easily deploy measures to prevent excessive configuration. The best way to do this is to write the load balancer directly into the application code, which automatically increases or reduces resources based on requirements. When some resources are no longer needed, resources should be reduced as appropriate. However, businesses may encounter problems such as vulnerabilities in software or distributed denial of service attacks that emit false resource extension requests.

Excessive configuration occurs primarily in IaaS and PAAs, as these are measured in terms of computation or storage. SaaS products traditionally do not have this problem because they are charged per user.

Staten says there are many reasons for the excessive configuration, and one of the most common reasons is that IT pros don't think about cloud environments in the right way. Developers and other end users often demand more resources than they need, so they don't have to "come back and ask for more resources." But for cloud resources, this mindset needs to change.

The problem is compounded by the large number of cloud services and prices on the market, Wagner said. Cloud service providers offer customers a wide variety of products at different prices.

For example, the industry leader Amazon Web Service's elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) has four versions to choose from, offering 1.7G of memory, a single EC2 cell, and 160G instant storage of 0.15 dollars per hour of products to provide 15G memory, 8 EC2 Computing units and 1600G instant-stored, 1.2-hour, oversized version models. In addition, there are high memory requirements and high CPU requirements for products, each product has different computing power. Alternatively, consumers can choose to pay by the year, rather than by the hour. Meanwhile, AWS has recently announced its 19th price cut in the past six years, while Windows Azure and Google have lowered their product prices.

"We are talking about a very confusing and volatile market, which has led consumers to be unable to fathom real costs and cloud resource consumption," said Wagner. ”

So how do companies know which resources to use? Each business is different, but Wagner says that, in general, if a company's services run in the cloud for 40% of the year, the yearly-paid product is more practical. The key is to understand the enterprise's computing power and cloud usage. Cloudyn's SaaS application tracks the computing usage of the enterprise and its cloud services, and other service providers in this area include uptime Softeware, Newvem, and Cloud Cruiser.

Staten said cloud monitoring and configuration analysis tools are now emerging, and he predicts that in the coming years, competition in the field will become more intense as cloud deployments become more widespread. "As the economic benefits of the cloud computing platform become more understandable, we will see increased demand for this type of tool, and I estimate that the cost tracker will be added to the traditional management tools," he says. ”

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)