At PTP we are work with clients every day that are leveraging the cloud to innovate faster. Our clients are well down the path to mastering cloud economics and understand how to better leverage the cloud for its agility and scalability while maximizing every penny of cost. An interesting outcome of these client engagements has been around cloud networking and how the technical teams that are designing network connectivity to their cloud environments are now faced with making finical decision as part of their design.
Historically network engineers would specify the required connectivity links, at fixed monthly cost, do a upfront procurement network routers, firewalls, switches, etc., and then go about the business of setting up the equipment and getting end users connected to applications. In today’s cloud-first world, network engineers have to take into consideration the per byte cost of data transfer, router instance size, load balancer sizing, firewall licensing models, and even the regions were data is routed to and from. Each one of these components has a direct financial impact on the ROI and TCO of an organizations cloud initiatives. One poor choice can run up thousands of dollars of unexpected costs.
If any of your technical teams are attempting to take the AWS Cloud Practitioner or Networking Specialty exams they will struggle with the cloud billing sections of the exams, as they have never really been faced with the financial considerations of their design choices after the initial purchase. From our experience, PTP has found that clients need to have the visibility and governance of their cloud environments down to each byte of data transferred. It pays to have the right cloud resource management process and tools in place to effectively operate in the cloud. There are many solutions on the market today that can help technical teams make good design choices and then monitor the economic implications in real-time. Don’t let a cloud networking design mistake be the downfall of your cloud project.