As-a-Service solutions are becoming the norm. That's why it's important to understand your business model and create a strategy to make the most of its adoption.
XaaS is a general term that refers to the delivery of IT solutions as a service. The “as a service” moniker points to the fact that these services are delivered over the Internet or accessible remotely, such as cloud-based services.
From a management perspective, “Everything As A Service” (or XaaS) models can be a strong cost-saving alternative by providing quick access to software and hardware resources. In the long term, XaaS helps companies avoid overhead and provides an easy-to-use path to scale their operations.
XaaS products come in all shapes and forms. Some are very easy to use, while others, like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, can be gimmicky, to say the least. In these cases, a lack of experience can lead to misuse and increased unseen costs.
Its complexity begs the question: are you sure you're using your XaaS to the fullest? Or can you find a way to get the same performance at a lower cost?
Understanding Payment Models
Traditionally, IT products can be categorized into 3 large groups, depending on their business model:
Perpetual License : Buy once, keep forever. This type of model is the norm for traditional software, but has become less common in the last decade. While a one-time investment may seem like the most affordable model, it can lead to overhead expenses in the future.
For example, major software updates tend to be sold under new licenses, so you end up having to pay for revisions.
Subscription-based: This is by far one of the most common models in retail: paying to access a service for a set period of time. Traditionally, access has some limitations, and some services allow their customers to purchase add-ons and/or upgrades if they reach their quota.
Subscription-based models, like Amazon's Lightsail, are perfect for small projects that have very specific requirements and won't scale in the medium to long term.
Pay-per-use: This is the business model that most major vendors offer. Instead of paying a fee for time-based access, you pay for what you use. For example, with a storage-as-a-service solution, you generally pay depending on how much data you are storing.
This is by far the most flexible model and can be extremely cost-effective when used intelligently. Since this is the most common business model in the XaaS landscape, this is what we will focus on today.
Hire the right kind of specialist
There's a reason why Amazon Web Services, Azure, Google Cloud, and every other major player in the XaaS market offers certifications. Their respective panels may be as easy to use as possible (which isn't very), but with the amount of customization, it's easy to get lost in a tsunami of options.
Look, even if you don't know anything about AWS, I can promise that with a blog post and a YouTube video, you can get an elastic server up and running in a matter of minutes. But how can you be sure you've chosen the right level for your needs? This is the kind of thing an expert can help you with.
One of the key skills of cloud engineers is an in-depth knowledge of cloud-based infrastructures. An expert can help you build and manage a service network designed specifically for your projects.
In addition to handling the service, they can also perform cost-return analyzes and adapt infrastructure to meet budget constraints. Do you need a dedicated cloud engineer? It depends.
For very complex projects that require managing many services at once, yes, you will want to have a full-time cloud engineer on your team. If you are working with a small-scale project, they may also be part of your IT department.
Focus on performance
The internet is full of horror stories of startups that racked up astronomical debt on XaaS products because of a bug in their code or because their software was poorly optimized.
In a normal environment, you have an upper limit. This means that if your software consumes more memory than your server can handle, it will freeze or crash. Likewise, if your database is larger than your disk drive, you will get an error.
But with XaaS products, especially scaling services, there is no upper limit (unless you configure it in advance). If you have a memory leak in your code, the system will continue to allocate more RAM to your account, and this can cost you very quickly.
Of course these are extreme cases, but the point remains valid. Poorly optimized software may use more processing power or memory than necessary for your current needs, which ends up creating overhead.
Constant checking, debugging, and performance testing are normal in the world of software development. But adding a few more tests and implementing a DevOps culture will help you save money in the long run.
Follow best practices for your services
Most services try to endorse a set of best practices to help their consumers. For example, almost all cloud-as-a-service providers actively encourage their users to shut down their instances when they are not in use.
Some services, such as AWS and Azure, have dedicated panels to promote such practices. For example, the services mentioned above offer cost management dashboards and automation tools to help you activate or deactivate instances under certain criteria. The tools are there, you just need to use them.
Can you use free tier services to get what you want? Many services, like Google Confab, offer low-level free-to-use options that, while not as powerful as their counterparts, can be used as small-scale solutions.
For example, if you want to train an AI, Google has some amazing free options. They even encourage potential users to engage with their free services to promote their ecosystem.
Opt for proprietary services
Databases can get quite expensive, but in the case of large service providers like Amazon or Azure, they often offer proprietary options that are much cheaper than your traditional relational database.
For example, Amazon Web Services has DynamoDB for NoSQL solutions and RDS for a relational solution. Azure, on the other hand, offers its excellent Azure SQL service.
While it may seem wrong to rely on proprietary technology, these solutions are designed from the ground up to be compatible with other traditional services, so you can import or export your RDS database and migrate it without much fuss.
Services tailored to your needs
Prepaid services are growing in popularity for a simple reason: it's one of the fairest business models on the market, as you only pay for what you use. And with a little forethought, this could be one of your greatest allies in reducing costs.
