[FinOps] Cost Optimisation Strategies in Alibaba Cloud | Prasanjit Singh

Alibaba Cloud offers a plethora of services to assist customers with their Cloud cost management, i.e., the structural planning that lets a company manage the costs of cloud technology. However, many users struggle to control their expenditure. Here are some points that you can use to reduce Alibaba Cloud costs for your company.

• Terminate unused ECS instances

Using Alibaba Cloud Cost Explorer Resource Optimization, you can get a report of idle or low-utilization instances. Once you identify these instances, you can stop or downsize them. Once you stop an instance, you must also terminate it. This is because if you stop an instance, your EBS costs will still be incurred. By terminating ECS instances, you will also stop EBS and ECS expenses.

• Cut oversized instances and volumes

Before deciding which instances and volumes need to be reduced, an in-depth analysis of all available data is required. Do not rely on data from a short period of time. The time frame for a data set should be at least one month, and make sure to check for seasonal peaks. Remember that you will not be able to reduce EBS volumes. So, once you know the appropriate size you require, create a new volume, and copy the data from the old volume.

• Use private IPs

Whenever you communicate in the Alibaba ECS network using public IPs or Elastic load balancer, you will always pay Intra-Region Data Transfer rates. Use private IPs to avoid paying this extra fee.

• Delete low-usage Alibaba EBS volumes

Track Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes for at least 1 week and identify those that have low activity (at least 1 input/output per second per day). Take a snapshot of these volumes (in case you will need them at a future date) and then delete them.

• Use Alibaba Cloud Savings Plan

Alibaba Cloud Savings plan is a flexible pricing model running for one to three years. In this model, you pay a lower price on ECS and Fargate usage for a promise of a steady amount of usage during the specified period. The agreed usage amount is usually discounted by more than 30%. Alibaba Cloud Savings Plan is ideal for stable businesses that know their resource requirements.

• Utilize Reserved Instances

By reserving an instance, you may save up to 70%. But, if you don't use the reserved instance as much as you expected, you may end up overpaying. This is because you will pay 24/7 utilization for the entire reserved period regardless of whether you used the resource or not.

• Buy reserved instances on the Alibaba Cloud marketplace

The Alibaba Cloud Marketplace is like a stock market. You can sometimes buy Standard Reserved Instances at extremely affordable prices in comparison to buying directly from Alibaba Cloud. In this way, you can end up saving almost 75%.

• Utilize Alibaba ECS Spot Instances

Spot instances can reduce costs by almost 90%. Spot instances are great for workloads that are fault-tolerant, for example, big data, web servers, containerized workloads, and high-performance computing (HPC). Auto-scaling automatically requests spot instances to meet target capacity during interruptions. 

• Configure autoscaling

Autoscaling allows your ECS fleet to increase or shrink based on demand. By configuring autoscaling, you can start and stop instances that don't get used frequently. You can review your scaling activity using the CLI command. Review the results to see whether instances can be added less aggressively or to see if the minimum can be reduced to serve requests with smaller fleet sizes.

• Choose availability zones and regions

The cost of Alibaba Cloud varies by region. Data transfers between different availability zones are charged an extra fee. It is therefore important to centralize operations and use single availability zones.