Our average client sees their average cloud costs increase by 10-20% each year (Gartner, 2022). It’s imperative you optimize your cloud solutions to achieve your intended goals while minimizing costs. But the more difficult problem is understanding why they’re increasing, what you can do about it, and which cloud investments are actually generating value for your customers and business.
This is where the Cloud Health Checkup comes in. In the cloud health checkup we assess your current state and goals, with a focus on identifying areas where costs can be reduced. We offer three options for this service, from the essentials to an in-depth assessment of your organization’s cloud opportunities:
1. Tune-Up
- In-depth analysis of cloud infrastructure
- Actionable recommendations for improvement
- One-week turnaround
Within one week, we provide you with an in-depth analysis of your cloud infrastructure, identifying areas where improvements can be made. We review your current cloud architecture, cost structure, and overall utilization patterns. We make recommendations on where you can see, and others in your industry reference set have seen, cost reduction. This may include consolidating redundant cloud resources, assessing the actual usage rate of data flows and business intelligence architectures, caching model outputs, identifying opportunities to leverage reserved instances, implementing cost-saving measures such as auto-scaling, etc.
Ongoing analytics, data, and AI model training workflows can be a significant source of cloud spend issues. The newest neural net doesn’t always bring a performance advantage over the previous flavor of the model, or even a simple (inexpensive and quick) regression. Yet the amount companies spend on AI training is doubling every 5 months! (Sevilla et al., 2016). Some of the projects we’ve helped with wasted half — 50%! — of their cloud spend for no appreciable value. The Tune-Up option gets you out of this trap quickly.
2. Portfolio Optimization
- Report on major cloud investments ranked by value created
- Interview feedback published for your team
- Two-week turnaround after interviews
In addition to the tune-up, we interview stakeholders to create an inventory of major initiatives that draw value from the cloud. We estimate the value created by the cloud for each of these initiatives. We summarize this information to rank initiatives in terms of the value they generate. We publish this report to your team within two weeks of the interviews being completed.
3. Architectural Reinvention
- Significant cost reduction and speed-ups (I’ve seen as much as 12,000x cost reduction…no joke)
- Developmental experience for team members who want to learn how the tech giants manage cloud technologies
- 12-week turnaround
In addition to options 1 and 2, we roll up our sleeves to reinvigorate the performance of your cloud spend. This may include the simplifying extraneous data architectures, model architectures, analytics architectures; re-evaluating the frequency and scope of model training, reducing unnecessary data storage costs, etc. With me in the trenches with you, the Architectural Reinvention option serves as a developmental experience for executives and team members who want to learn how the tech giants manage cloud technologies. This option can take more or less time based on the extent to which we recommend changes; on average we complete it within 12 weeks.
One of my clients in finance spent — and this is not a joke — 12,000x more than was necessary to produce the outputs they required for trading systems. They routinely waited days for this output that should have taken seconds, like it did after our intervention. In the process they recovered significant market opportunity (it’s called “alpha” in finance) they had previously missed. Businesses are often running model training workflows that are unnecessary and do not materially improve the performance of the model or the business. We will make sure that doesn’t happen. Don’t make the same mistake!
All of these options can be combined with Dr. Joe’s Office Hours™ for implementation accountability and team member development.
For further information, get in touch with Dr. Joe ➡️