Voice of the DBA

Cloud costs are high and growing. Some orgs think they’re out of control and are trying to limit spend. Some orgs are looking to leave the cloud. A lot of IT spend over the years has been seen as a cost center, with many executives trying to limit the growth or spend, even while they aim for digital transformations of their businesses. Throughout my career, it’s been interesting seeing the tension of groups trying to take advantage of technology and the finance departments trying to manage costs.

The cloud brings some of the same debates/arguments/concerns to the forefront. Partially because of scale, as we can add cloud resources much quicker than we can with a CapEx purchase. Partially because we’ve also often lost some control over budgeting with the move to OpEx and the subscription paradigm.

However, the bigger problem is that we get a true chargeback for all the resources we use. This is done in a way that exceeds what I used to see with mainframes. In those days each department got a monthly report of their usage, applied against their budget. In the cloud world, finance gets a real bill they have to pay, and the chargeback is not a made-up number for internal use.

How can you reduce the cost in the cloud for your database (or all data) resources? The easy answer to start is to get rid of those resources that aren’t being used. How many databases have been created for dev/test and aren’t actively used? That’s often an easy chore, and one that could be scripted. Though I’d want to include backups of anything I get rid of that might be reused. That might include dev systems rarely used. Keeping a backup that I can use to restore to a new resource later is always a good idea.

In line with this, you might look for underutilized instances, especially for VMs or expensive services like Managed Instances. There can be a cost overhead for these systems, and if every application/department/etc. uses a separate system, there might be cost savings from consolidation. However, don’t just move databases. Ensure you aren’t creating a security risk or overloading the system with moves. That requires some analysis of the current systems and buy-in from those with security concerns.

However, the biggest win in reducing cloud cost is to performance tune your code. This is something many DBAs request on a regular basis, but often there isn’t any push to write better code, or utilize better patterns of querying that might reduce the amount of CPU, memory, and network traffic. Learn how to write better performing queries, limit the data returned (no SELECT *), watching out for datatype conversions, and using other techniques that people write about at SQL Server Central every day. We constantly answer questions and publish articles on better ways to write code, so invest the time to ensure your teams can and do write better code. Make sure you train your staff and they use their training.

Lastly, you are in the cloud because you’re willing to change how you work. Don’t be afraid of changing your existing code. If you refactor and break something, change it back. The cloud makes this easy, so take advantage of that and keep improving your code.

Steve Jones

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