Why should cloud management software be part of your AWS & Azure cloud management strategy?

Steve Rastall (Founder & CEO) 18-Nov-2024 14:43:56

AWS Managed Cloud Service Azure Managed Cloud Service

If you have deployments in AWS or Azure, a cloud management solution should be a key part of your setup.

In this article, we discuss why this is the case and how it can accelerate your cloud adoption, make your team more efficient and save you time and money.

What is cloud management software?

Cloud management software refers to a suite of tools and applications designed to allow an administrator to gain visibility and control over their cloud deployments. Some types of cloud management software handle only one specialised function like monitoring others are a platform approach bringing together multiple areas of functionality.

Why do you need it?

There are a number of reasons why cloud management software can be an advantage:

Automate processes for maintenance / monitoring / provisioning
Gain visibility into your use of cloud services
Gain insight into the health of your cloud infrastructure as it evolves
Cost modelling / Alerting & recommendations to make your cloud spend more efficient
Visibility of your cloud deployments in a central dashboard

What are the key components of a cloud management solution?

There are a number of key components that you should look for, such as:

Resource monitoring - See how your cloud infrastructure is performing and identify any issues

Auto-scaling - Scale your deployments up or down automatically in response to changes in demand

Provisioning - Automate the provisioning of new resources, such as when you need to add new servers or storage

Auto-recovery - Recover from outages or incidents automatically, and provide alerts

Alerting & logging - Dashboards and alerts to keep you on top of any issues with your cloud infrastructure and highlight any areas of concern

Choose the right cloud management platform for your business

There are a few crucial considerations you should make while researching cloud management solutions:

Ease of use - You shouldn't need extensive training to use this, it should be something an administrator can pick up quickly

Flexibility- Allows you to tailor it to the needs of your business

Support - Access to experts in case you need them, as well as to act as a sounding board for new areas

Pricing - Offer value for money

Roadmap - A known direction so you know that over the long term, it will cover new functionality areas and expand as your business grows

The Partner - The company behind the software should have some depth and experience and a team that has the right experience & certification

What can a cloud management solution do for you?

It can help you save time and money by automating repetitive tasks such as provisioning and monitoring. This frees up your staff to focus on more strategic tasks (Several of our customers have implemented CloudOps for this reason. Read about their cloud journeys here). In addition, it can help you optimise your use of resources, which can lead to cost savings.

A cloud management solution can aid in the optimisation of your cloud infrastructure. You can identify and address any issues before they influence your organisation by having visibility into your resources and performance data.

Often most importantly, a cloud management solution can help you get visibility and control of your cloud infrastructure costs across AWS & Azure without first carrying out a project to understand the built-in tools and configure them.

In addition, a cloud management solution can help you comply with regulations and security best practices by providing features such as role-based access control and auditing. By using a cloud management solution, you can be sure that your cloud infrastructure is running smoothly and securely.

In conclusion, a cloud management solution should be a key part of your cloud infrastructure, whether you're running on AWS or Azure. It can help you save time and money, improve performance and scale seamlessly.

Why should software as a service (SaaS) or independent software vendors (ISVs) implement a cloud management solution?

The primary focus of a SaaS or ISV business should be the service it offers to customers and expanding its install base. Anything that takes time/resources away from that should be examined and eliminated.

Most of the SaaS / ISV businesses we have worked with have saved a large amount of internal staff time just by implementing CloudOps. Instead of firefighting issues with the cloud infrastructure that their customer's services run on they have moved to be more proactive.

This has led to several positive benefits:

Saved technical team time often amounting to up to one full time employee a month (This time is then available again for their roadmap)
Better service for customers with more robust cloud infrastructure and reduced outage or number of incidents
Better visibility within your business of cloud costs and the ability to surface that information to other teams like finance and management

We recently published a case study about Adaptive, who working with CloudOps has realised savings of:

18 developer days each month
15% reduction in cloud management costs in the first three months
£45,000 staff cost saving on going

Stop wasting time on firefighting issues that pull you away from your business objective and get back to pushing your roadmap forward. Find out how CloudOps can help you achieve this.

How does cloud management software save your team time & reduce staff costs?

The main way cloud management software saves your team time is by automating repetitive tasks. For example, you can use cloud management software to automate the provisioning of new resources when you need to scale up your infrastructure. This means that your team doesn't need to manually provision new resources every time you need to scale, which can save a lot of time.

A side advantage of this is that it also allows you to keep your processes consistent every time, using the same documented approach.

In addition, cloud management software can automate tasks such as monitoring and logging. This means that your team doesn't need to manually check the status of your resources or check logs for errors. The cloud management software will do this for you, which can save a lot of time.

Your team can just review a dashboard or set up alerts for any exceptions which have to be resolved manually.

Finally, cloud management software can also help you surface information between teams such as finance and technical who both need information about the cloud but from different angles.

Reduce the scope of your internal team

Often when working with SaaS & ISV businesses you see a core technical team that is passionate about their software product. However, this can often mean that there is a trade-off within the team in certain areas, such as a cloud architect/administrator.

Often this is split between a consultant or a partner who looks after the cloud environment to some extent. This approach in most SaaS / ISV businesses I have worked with is often a legacy from their previous on-premise install.

Moving to the cloud has then often been a painful experience with unexpected levels of cost or surprises along the way. A cloud management solution often allows you to avoid this by leveraging the best practice recommendations from the platform.

Also, cloud management software will take into account the evolving cloud platforms and will make recommendations about new services/features as they become available or they are retired.

As an example of this working with certain types of virtual machines on AWS & Azure CloudOps will make cost recommendations based on utilisation vs spend. In some cases, we have saved our customers over 30% of their cloud spend by reducing over-resourced machines or implementing auto-scaling for peak periods.

Make your team happier and get the best out of them

A knock-on effect of stable cloud infrastructure is that your team gets their focus back on their roadmap. They are actually back to working on the things they find interesting.

In my experience most small to medium ISV/SaaS teams are heavily made up of developers and they hate working on infrastructure and hate having the business breathing down their neck even more.

This then leads to a lowering in team morale and a feeling of being under pressure all the time, which is no good for any team. A cloud management solution removes this and helps them get back on track and put their efforts into the next release cycle not just in keeping the software up or reacting to incidents.

How does cloud management software save you money?

The main area is cost control through recommendations, and the ability to see everything as an administrator in one place.

In addition, a cloud management solution can help you get visibility and control of your cloud infrastructure costs across AWS & Azure without first carrying out a project to understand the built-in tools and configure them.

More importantly, a cloud management solution can help you take advantage as your chosen cloud platform evolves and new services become available. This can be something as simple as a new version of a virtual machine with a different specification of cores to RAM or something more complex like the commitment terms or spot instances market.

In conclusion, a good cloud management solution will enable cost savings by optimising what you have/need to deploy and making it more efficient. It will also keep you up to date with changes in the cloud as they become available and ensure you are on the most efficient payment/procurement model for the cloud.

Why not just use the native tools / APIs in AWS and Azure?

A question I hear often from business professionals from different areas of the company is... "Doesn't Azure / AWS do all of this out of the box?"

Taking the area of cloud cost optimization as an example each of the cloud platforms available from Amazon (AWS) and Microsoft (Azure) have components for this.

But... and it's a big but... they all require set-up & configuration and they are changing all the time. So you almost end up setting up a project to implement/deploy the monitoring for each of the areas you use. Then you have to stay on top of them to get the benefit out of them.

Also, these tools are only for tier individual platforms and they will not make recommendations about cost-saving or alternatives. They will just tell you what you are spending. You will still have to dig through the cost/performance data and set up the alerts before you make any progress into the issues you are having.

A cloud management solution should include cost and performance recommendations tailored to your cloud deployment and you can accept or reject them without carrying out an internal project.

What operational impact does implementing cloud management have once it's in place?

The operational impact of deploying cloud management will be determined by the scale and complexity of your installations, as well as the size of your internal staff. A cloud management system, on the other hand, can help you save time and money, increase performance, and scale seamlessly.

All of our SaaS customers have reported significant time savings in their development teams which was spent just running / reacting to issues with their cloud infrastructure in AWS & Azure.

Why is CloudOps the perfect approach for your cloud management solution?

CloudOps is built to solve all the issues discussed here, and more. CloudOps has been built based on decades of experience managing cloud environments.

We have worked with hundreds of cloud deployments in AWS & Azure and with businesses both large and small. We also have the experience of working with SaaS/ISV businesses to help them get the most out of their cloud infrastructure.

CloudOps is built around a single portal which brings together monitoring for performance / cost / maintenance as well as security and support.

CloudOps Features:

Always-on support; fault, find, and fix
Easy-to-use management, monitoring, and reporting dashboards
Proactive infrastructure optimisation
Monitoring / Patching / 24-hour support
Guaranteed cost savings.

CloudOps is a proven way of solving the challenge of cloud management. The system can be implemented across any new or existing AWS and Azure cloud environment, allowing you to focus on delivering applications and services rather than worrying about maintaining your cloud infrastructure.

Unlike a traditional cloud support service, CloudOps already includes all the features and functionality your business needs without any hidden costs or surprise charges.

CloudOps will:

Become an integral part of your team, delivering high-quality advice and support
Allow you to concentrate on delivering your own services and applications
Improve overall business profitability and reduce cloud costs
Provide full confidence in the security of your applications and data
Enable your business to grow through the cloud.

Find out more here.