Amid winds of economic uncertainty, executive management may demand IT teams cut down on cloud spending, but those demands should be to optimize rather than slash cloud budgets, Harness.io's Julie Herd told SDxCentral.

The foundation to optimizing cloud spending is an organization's understanding of how and where it spends money in the cloud. "You have to know what you're spending in order to know where to optimize it," Herd said. "What are your revenue generating products that are generating that cloud cost, and what are they generating in revenue?" She recommends using that new understanding "as more of a strategic way to understand where your cloud spend is going."

Implementing a FinOps practice and adopting cloud-native technologies are other avenues for optimizing organizational cloud spend, Herd added. "Culturally, you need to make sure there are people who are responsible for understanding what your cloud costs are [and] understanding a strategy – beyond just going into cloud cost tools and getting recommendations for rightsizing or downsizing," she said.

Even before enterprises consider traditional cloud cost management tasks, they should evaluate the state of their architecture from a cloud optimization lens.

Some organizations still try to deploy an on-premises application in a virtual machine in the cloud and are confused when the promised cost savings don't arrive. "Why aren't we getting the cost savings? Because you are running a virtual machine and an application that expects a 24 by 7 server underneath it that can't be shut down." That leaves "no ability to actually scale up or scale down on that application," Herd explained.

Enterprises should take advantage of cloud-native technologies like containerizations and microservices, because they allow applications to dynamically scale up or down as needed. This promotes cloud optimization and tackles "another larger, bigger ticket item in your architecture to be able to really optimize that and move away from lift and shift," she added.

The beautiful thing about optimization is that it addresses multiple areas: cloud spend and environmental sustainability. Harness' cloud cost management tool provides savings in both areas through proactive management of vital resources, Herd explained.

Harness' cloud auto-stopping capability assesses an organization's cloud architecture to find where cloud resources are running idly and stop them. Herd noted dev and QA environments "are ripe for optimization in that fashion" because those engineers don't work 24 hours each day or seven days each week. Even during working hours, engineers spend time in meetings or doing something other than developing.

Harness' cloud auto-stopping has saved its customers up to 90% on cloud costs, Herd claimed. "Of course, that goes straight to sustainability, because the less you're using in the cloud, then that's less [resources] those cloud providers need to provision," she explained.

Another key tenant of Harness' cloud cost management tool "is that we start with the idea that we want to automate [cloud cost management] and take the burden away from your developers, because it's all about increasing developer productivity – not burdening them with more things to do, especially with" something like cloud cost management, she said.

While the demand for cloud sustainability management is "an emerging discussion," Herd noted, "It's becoming more prevalent," and "more companies really do have ESG [environmental, social, and governance] initiatives that they want to ensure not only on their internal applications, but also what they're doing in the cloud meets the sustainability objectives."