Due to the ongoing pandemic and subsequent economic uncertainty, managing IT costs has become a critical consideration for Independent Software Vendors. In this article, we review some of the ways that ISVs can optimise their cloud costs on Microsoft Azure.
Due to the ongoing pandemic and subsequent economic uncertainty, managing IT costs has become a critical consideration for Independent Software Vendors. ISVs are challenged with making operations more effective and productive and finding ways to increase efficiency and optimize costs.
Currently, if you are an ISV it is no doubt challenging for you and your teams who are taking on new cost responsibilities daily, all while continuously adapting to working remotely. Microsoft have defined four stages for optimizing costs in the cloud.
The initial planning of your workload and their architecture and cost model are included under the design stage.
This includes capturing clear requirements. estimating the initial projected costs and understanding your policies and any constraints you many face.
Once you have completed the design stages, the provision stage can be done.
This stage involves choosing and deploying the resources that encompass your workload. There are some considerations and tradeoffs impacting cost at this stage, like which services to choose and which SKUs and regions to select.
After you provision your resources, ISVs should continue to monitor their deployed workloads, how it is being used and the overall spend. This can be managed by building spend reports based on tags, regularly reviewing costs with your team and responding to alerts such as spending anomalies or approaching the spend limits set.
By monitoring deployed workloads, ISVs can resize underutilized resources, and make workloads more efficient by using reserved instances for consistent workloads or perhaps re-evaluating initial design choices.
The initial design and provision stages generally apply to new workloads you’re planning to develop. The last two, monitor and optimize, contain guidance primarily geared towards workloads you’ve already deployed and are running in the cloud.
ISVs are often seeking new methods to increase the scalability of their applications and improve overall workflows. Migrating and modernising applications on Azure can help achieve these goals.
Spanish Point Technologies has worked with many ISVs to help them harness the power of Azure for their applications.
Our development teams have migrated numerous ISV applications to Azure and have a deep understanding of Azure and its complimentary features and technologies. We can share years of experience in Azure development with CTOs, helping them define their cloud goals.
An efficient way to define your Azure migration strategy is through SMART AIM or by contacting us directly for a free consultation.
