The arrival of Covid-19 accelerated the adoption of cloud services to achieve business optimization and support the high digital demand in accordance with these confinement times, but these tools have been used for a long time.

But like any company that learns, a few years ago at Imagemaker we made a series of beginner mistakes that cost us a lot when implementing a cloud service to a client. We want to share them so that they do not happen to you.

Here we give you three basic tips so that you can get the most out of your cloud service budget, based on the experiences of our company:

1. Set up the cloud capacity according to your needs

Has it happened to you that you have tried to shop on a website during a Cyber ​​Day and it does not load or you drop the page? This is because the site did not correctly measure the capacity that its infrastructure should have to support that traffic.

It happened the other way around to us. Some time ago, when we were still in diapers and started in the world of clouds, a client asked us for support with his site that was visited by approximately 80 users daily, which is considered low demand. However, on that occasion, we configured a productive instance with automatic scaling of three instances, we went hard!

That is, we had made a configuration to support more demand than necessary and therefore, the cost was seen considerably as well. In short, we were attacking a fly with a bazooka ... Don't let it happen to you!

Finally we identify, acknowledge and assume the damages… to this day we continue to have a good relationship with them.

It is important that you identify the technologies that you have available and those that you will need to achieve your goals. Once you have this estimate, you must set up the capacity according to your needs to avoid incurring additional expenses.

2. Use autoscaling! when you're sure of it ...

Given fluctuations in demand, it is not easy to know in advance the capacity required for your cloud services. Most cloud providers have systems to configure autoscaling.

Remember that you can create automated processes to scale vertically, that is, the server will have greater hardware capacity. With this, you will avoid unexpected crashes, despite automatic horizontal scaling or replication of instances due to memory or CPU problems.

Don't forget to quantify the consumption in bytes used by your services. This way you will know what is the capacity you need to support the approximate estimated demand of your project. You can also perform load tests, measuring the expected transactions per second and seeing the behavior of the system.

The efficient use of your services will be directly reflected in your costs!

3. Be proactive with your budget

It is important to bear in mind that cloud services incorporate the cost calculator option that will help you establish capacity limits in relation to costs. We recommend that you use this tool and set up an alert for the system to notify you when you are reaching the pre-established threshold, so that you can anticipate and mitigate possible problems associated with costs.

For example, keep in mind that if a service is only operated during business hours, it is not necessary to have it operating outside of this period, so you can automate certain processes to use the service when it is really necessary.

In addition, there are real-time advisory tools that help you deliver advice to reduce costs, increase performance and safety.

We invite you to review the status of your cloud so that you do not make mistakes that may cost you more than you expect.

Have any of these errors happened to you? Don't let it happen to you! If you want to raise your business to the clouds, we are the experts you are looking for, contact Víctor Agurto at victor.agurto@imagemaker.com