Kenya, a major player in the East African region, is experiencing a surge in cloud adoption, driven by robust economic growth and a projected GDP of $132 billion. Kenya’s economic growth is giving businesses greater access to capital, enabling increased investment in digital transformation to improve efficiency, scalability, and competitiveness — fueling a rise in cloud adoption. At the same time, regulatory requirements for local data processing are accelerating the shift toward cloud solutions that comply with data sovereignty laws.
Establishing a high-performing IT system for a Kenyan business requires a thorough understanding of the associated costs, which differ significantly between on-premises and cloud solutions.
Building an on-premises setup demands substantial upfront investment in hardware, including servers, additional components, and software licenses. They also need to account for operational expenses such as electricity to power and cool equipment, backup infrastructure, downtime prevention mechanisms, and staff training.
Many businesses find that building and maintaining their own IT infrastructure is neither cost-effective nor flexible enough to keep pace with changing demands. Consequently, a growing number are turning to cloud services.
In this article, Servercore, a company providing IT and cloud infrastructure services, advises Kenyan businesses to adopt practical strategies to optimize cloud spending. These include eliminating unused resources, choosing the right size of computing services like shared cores or bare metal instances, and using autoscaling to automatically adjust capacity. By following these approaches, companies can better manage costs while maximizing the benefits of cloud technology.
Cloud migration of GoDeliveries, a food delivery service in Kenya, is one of the latest examples of implementing cost-effective strategies. Servercore helped GoDeliveries to switch from their old cloud provider which led to a significant 43% reduction in overall cloud IT infrastructure costs through Servercore’s transparent pay-as-you-go billing model. The migration project involved a comprehensive review of GoDeliveries’ existing infrastructure and application dependencies. It encompassed detailed planning, the setup of custom high-performance cloud servers and a MySQL cloud database, performance testing, ensuring security and compliance, and continuous monitoring.
Based on expertise and experience of cutting clients’ cloud spending, Servercore shares some practical advice that will help other companies optimize infrastructure expenses.
3 Smart Ways Kenyan Businesses Can Cut Cloud Costs
Cloud cost optimisation focuses on reducing overall cloud spending through various strategies. Companies can implement one or a combination of these approaches to create a customised setup. Here are some of the most common strategies and tools for managing them:
- Eliminate Wasted Resources: Wasted resources refer to unused or unattached cloud assets that still incur costs. All IT environments can accumulate unused resources, such as unattached storage, idle load balancers, or dormant computing instances. It’s common to overlook deactivating these resources when they are no longer in use. For instance, after shutting down a temporary server, its associated storage might be inadvertently left active, leading to unnecessary expenses.
Servercore and some other cloud providers offer “frozen instances” as a solution to mitigate wasted resources and overpayments. These allow significant cost reductions for virtual machines (VMs) that are not actively used but still need to be preserved. Implementing cloud monitoring tools is essential to identify underutilised instances suitable for freezing.
Frozen instances are particularly beneficial for development and testing environments, seasonal workloads, and project-based tasks. - Choose the Right Size for Computing Services: Businesses must meticulously assess their computing needs for each segment of their operations. The cheapest option is not always the most cost-effective. Servercore offers flexible choices to meet diverse business requirements:
Shared Cores: Utilising them on cloud platforms is an effective way to lower cloud costs. Shared cores typically cost less than dedicated ones because users are not paying for exclusive CPU usage. By strategically deploying this tool for appropriate tasks, organisations can significantly reduce their cloud computing costs while retaining the ability to handle sudden increases in performance demands. They are well-suited for microservices, web servers, development environments, and small databases.
Bare Metal Instances: In specific scenarios, bare metal instances can offer a cost-effective solution for businesses.These are physical servers dedicated to a single customer, providing direct hardware access without a virtualisation layer. This direct access can lead to improved performance for certain tasks, potentially requiring fewer instances and subsequently lowering overall costs. Bare metal instances can be optimal for applications such as high-performance computing, gaming servers, big data analysis, media processing and rendering, I/O-intensive databases, and legacy applications that do not perform optimally in virtualised environments.
- Utilise Autoscaling to Cut Costs: Autoscaling continuously monitors applications and dynamically adjusts server capacity to maintain consistent performance at the lowest possible cost. It also saves time and effort by automating responses to sudden traffic surges, automatically activating the necessary resources and instances by modifying the number of active servers. For example, autoscaling can reduce costs by managing applications during peak and off-peak periods, allowing the server to automatically adapt to demand.
For implementing this strategy with cloud solutions, the Kubernetes (K8S) autoscaler is highly beneficial. This is a powerful tool that can significantly reduce cloud costs by automatically adjusting the number of nodes in a cluster based on resource utilisation. This means it scales resources up or down according to actual demand. By effectively utilising the K8S autoscaler, organisations can achieve a balance between performance and cost, ensuring they only pay for the resources they truly need and use. This can lead to substantial cloud cost savings, particularly for applications with fluctuating workloads, such as web applications.
How Companies Implement Cost-effective Cloud Strategy
Modernising IT systems offers several avenues for cost savings by enhancing the efficiency of existing systems and decommissioning outdated ones. A 43% reduction in GoDeliveries IT infrastructure costs after migrating to Servercore, was realised by selecting an infrastructure plan optimally suited to the company’s specific needs, thereby eliminating unnecessary overpayments.
In order to optimise cloud expenses, companies can either conduct an infrastructure audit and implement practical strategies above on their own or enlist the help of cloud provider experts with a comprehensive review of existing infrastructure and application dependencies, detailed planning, the setup of tailored infrastructure, and continuous monitoring.
