How to Identify Hidden Costs in Cloud Services

Watch out for these hidden cloud costs to avoid a surprise on your monthly bill! 💸 👉 Free Tier Confusion: AWS boasts a variety of free offerings for many common services, but not all services fall under this free tier. Some services, even though partially free, have usage caps, and going beyond these caps might significantly increase your costs. 👉 Elastic IP Limits: AWS allows up to five free Elastic IPs per account. If you exceed this allowance, you'll incur a small but recurring fee for each additional IP, which varies from one region to another. 👉 Load Balancer Fees: Load balancers are billed by the hour, whether you're using them or not. Plus, transferring data to and from the load balancer adds extra costs on top of the hourly rate. 👉 Costs of Elastic Block Storage (EBS): Billing for EBS is calculated based on the amount of storage used per month, including both active and inactive (unattached) volumes. 👉 Overlooked EBS Snapshots: Simply deleting an EBS volume doesn't erase its snapshots. These lingering snapshots can lead to unexpected charges. 👉 S3 Usage Fees: Although storing data in S3 is cost-effective, the fees for operations like GET and LIST requests can end up costing more than the storage itself in some cases. 👉 Incomplete S3 Uploads: Failed parts of a multipart upload in S3 still count towards your bill. Regularly cleaning up these incomplete uploads can help keep costs down. 👉 Data Transfer Charges: Bringing data into AWS is free, but sending data out (egress) can come with a hefty price tag, especially if there's a lot of data to move. By keeping these points in mind, you can better manage your cloud budget and avoid that bill shock by the end of the month. Image source: bytebytego.com

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗛𝗶𝗱𝗱𝗲𝗻 𝗖𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝗗𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: 𝗗𝗮𝗿𝗸 𝗗𝗮𝘁𝗮 We all know that data growth brings challenges like security risks and the struggle to harness it for business value. But there’s a less-discussed issue that’s quietly driving up costs for enterprises: dark data (also known as shadow data). 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗱𝗮𝗿𝗸 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮? It's the data that’s stored but never accessed, managed poorly, or simply forgotten. And here’s the kicker — if that data is stored in hot cloud storage, the costs can skyrocket without you even realizing it. 𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗰𝗮𝗿𝗲? 1. Cloud costs are rising – Storing unused data in expensive "hot" storage? Your cloud bill is growing faster than you can blink. 2. Security risks – Forgotten data is data that isn't being properly secured. If no one's looking at it, who’s protecting it? 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻? Every enterprise needs a data security platform that includes data discovery and analytics. This platform should: - Identify which data is being accessed (and which isn’t) - Recommend eliminating data that hasn’t been used in a while - Protect your organization by reducing the risk of forgotten, unsecured data Bonus? FinOps teams love this! 🌟 By eliminating dark data, you can cut down on cloud costs significantly—sometimes enough to offset the cost of your security platform entirely. ✅ The takeaway: Investing in the right tools for data discovery not only helps secure your data but can also lead to huge cost savings for your business. Let’s talk about how dark data is affecting your bottom line. Have you started addressing it yet? #DataSecurity #CloudCostOptimization #FinOps #DataDiscovery #TechInnovation #CyberSecurity #CloudComputing #DigitalTransformation

Each internal API call your application makes quietly adds milliseconds to your customer's checkout and dollars to your monthly cloud bill. On the surface, these milliseconds seem harmless. But traced end-to-end, they can inflate a 1.8-second load time into a sluggish 2.2-second experience, silently driving users away. Take a typical e-commerce checkout: Inventory checks, Price lookups, and Authentication services chatter behind the scenes. Each hop adds 20-40 ms and incurs cross-zone network charges that you rarely notice until your bounce rate spikes and your cloud spend edges upward. A retail team I worked with reduced internal latency by collapsing two talkative microservices into a single streamlined call. The simple change reclaimed 90 ms per checkout and shaved 12% off their inter-zone network costs. Those invisible milliseconds directly translated into fewer abandoned carts and lower monthly bills. The fix is straightforward: - Rank your busiest internal endpoints by the impact on latency. - Batch or merge the chattiest services. - Co-locate critical calls within the same zone. These targeted moves can help you recover speed and savings. To see precisely how to identify these costly internal hops and turn them into tangible gains, I detailed the complete measurement framework in this week's Simform Newsletter. Link is in the bio if you're ready to reclaim hidden latency.