Beyond the Lift-and-Shift: A Practical Guide to Cloud Cost Optimisation

Beyond the Lift-and-Shift: A Practical Guide to Cloud Cost Optimisation

Moving to the cloud is like switching your company’s IT from a fixed monthly rent to a pay-as-you-go utility model. The freedom, speed, and scalability are immense, but without discipline, every light switch left on and tap left running contributes to a surprisingly high bill at the end of the month.

As global cloud adoption soars, a critical business practice has emerged: FinOps, or Cloud Financial Management. It’s the culture of bringing technology, finance, and business teams together to gain financial control and predictability over variable cloud spend.

Whether you are planning your first migration or are already operating in the cloud, embedding a cost-aware mindset is the key to long-term success. This guide covers the essential strategies for controlling your cloud costs—before and after you migrate.

Phase 1: The Blueprint for a Cost-Effective Migration

True cost optimisation begins long before you move a single workload. Rushing into the cloud without a plan is the number one cause of budget overruns. Here are five foundational steps to take first.

1. Define Clear Business Goals: Why are you moving? Is it to exit a data centre, improve disaster recovery, or increase development agility? Your “why” will dictate your technical strategy and define what success looks like.
2. Understand the Service Models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS): Choosing between Infrastructure-as-a-Service (like EC2), Platform-as-a-Service (like RDS), or Software-as-a-Service comes with different levels of control, responsibility, and pricing. Match the model to your technical needs and operational capacity.
3. Choose the Right Cloud Provider: Compare providers across the criteria that matter to you—be it specific service offerings, data residency options to comply with UK or EU regulations, support quality, or pricing models.
4. Forecast Costs with a Data-Driven Assessment: Don’t guess. Use a pre-migration assessment (like an AWS OLA) to analyse your current usage. This data allows you to build an accurate forecast and a compelling business case for the migration.
5. Build Security and Compliance in from Day One: Understand your obligations under regulations like GDPR and design your cloud architecture to meet them from the start. Security is not an afterthought; it’s a prerequisite.

Phase 2: Mastering Continuous Cloud Cost Management

Once you are in the cloud, optimisation becomes an ongoing practice. Here are proven strategies to master your cloud spend.

1. Foundational Savings: The Quickest Wins

• Right-Size Your Resources: This is the most effective cost-saving lever. Don’t pay for capacity you don’t use.
  • Example: Use native tools like AWS Compute Optimizer, which uses machine learning to analyse your workload patterns and recommend a more appropriate instance type. Moving a non-intensive workload from a t3.xlarge to a t3.medium can cut costs by 75%.
• Use Commitment-Based Discounts: If you have predictable, steady-state workloads, on-demand pricing is leaving money on the table.
  • Example: AWS offers Savings Plans and Reserved Instances (RIs). Think of RIs as pre-booking a specific hotel room (e.g., an m5.large in London) for 1-3 years at a huge discount. Savings Plans are more flexible, like a pre-paid voucher for a certain spend (e.g., £10/hour) across any “room” (EC2 or Fargate instance) in any location. For most, Savings Plans are the more flexible and modern choice.
• Switch to Modern, Efficient Compute: Not all instances are created equal.
  • Example: Migrate suitable workloads to instances powered by AWS’s own Graviton (ARM-based) processors. They can offer up to 40% better price-performance over comparable x86-based instances for a wide range of applications.
• Leverage Spot Instances for Non-Critical Workloads: For fault-tolerant workloads like batch processing, data analysis, or development/testing environments, Spot Instances can provide discounts of up to 90%.

2. Architectural Efficiency: The Long-Term Plays

• Optimise Your Storage Automatically: Cloud storage costs can accumulate quietly.
  • Example: Instead of manually managing storage tiers, use Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering. This service automatically moves your data to the most cost-effective storage tier based on how frequently it’s accessed, saving you time and money without any operational overhead.
• Go Serverless for Event-Driven Workloads: Platforms like AWS Lambda let you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You pay only for the compute time you consume—down to the millisecond—making it perfect for intermittent or event-driven tasks.
• Embrace Containerisation for Density: Using containers with an orchestrator like Kubernetes (EKS) allows you to pack more applications onto a single virtual machine, dramatically improving resource utilisation and reducing waste.

3. Operational Excellence: Making It Stick

• Automate Everything with Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Use tools like Terraform or AWS CloudFormation to define and manage your infrastructure. This prevents manual configuration drift and makes it easy to enforce cost-saving standards.
  • Example: Automate “start/stop” schedules for development and staging environments so that they are not running and incurring costs outside of business hours.
• Implement a Robust Tagging Strategy: You cannot optimise what you cannot measure. A consistent tagging policy is essential for allocating costs to the correct project, team, or application. This visibility is the bedrock of any successful FinOps practice.
• Monitor and Iterate: Use tools like AWS Cost Explorer to visualise your spend and identify trends. Set up budgets and alerts in AWS Budgets to be notified before you have a cost overrun. Optimisation is not a one-time project; it’s a continuous cycle.

Final Thoughts: Align Cost Efficiency with Cloud Innovation

Controlling cloud costs is not about restricting innovation; it’s about enabling it sustainably. By adopting a FinOps culture and implementing these practical strategies, you can ensure your cloud investment delivers maximum value. It’s about balancing performance and price, using automation intelligently, and empowering your teams to make cost-aware decisions at every stage of their journey.

Ready to Take Control of Your Cloud Spend?

Let Ficode help you build a robust FinOps strategy and unlock the full potential of your cloud investment—without overspending. Reach out today to explore how we can support your cloud cost optimisation journey.