How to Reduce Costs with DevOps? 7 Simple but High-Impact Ways to Save Money

If you’ve followed us for a while, you probably know how often we talk about the benefits of following DevOps practices. In short, DevOps significantly increases efficiency and performance, reduces time-to-market, enables faster innovation, and more.

But did you know DevOps also helps you reduce costs?

It all comes down to automation. Whether that means you need a smaller team to manage your infrastructure, or you dynamically scale your infrastructure up and down based on the amount of traffic you get, the bottom line is DevOps helps you save money. And, of course, as a DevOps automation platform, Bunnyshell has your back when it comes to optimizing your budget.

In this article, we’ll highlight some ways in which DevOps enables you to reduce costs, along with how Bunnyshell helps.

This is an obvious one but still overlooked by many organizations. Moving your infrastructure in the cloud not only eliminates development and maintenance costs (granted, you pay a monthly fee, but that’s still significantly less than the costs associated with building and upkeeping your own infrastructure) but also frees up time for your team to focus on effective automation strategies that further optimize your spending.

Whether your application requires serverless computing or Artificial Intelligence, Bunnyshell integrates with all the main cloud services providers such as AWS, GCP, Microsoft Azure, or DigitalOcean to help you manage your infrastructure seamlessly. Moreover, we make it easier for you to adopt a multi-cloud strategy.

Each app requires a unique infrastructure and has unique requirements. We know from experience that when organizations decide to move their infrastructure in the cloud or migrate from one cloud provider to another, their lack of experience can cause increased costs in the long run. This is due to the fact that they don’t assess their project correctly and either omit to buy services/resources or end up buying more than they need.

Because of this, we also offer our customers consulting services. We use our years of experience in DevOps automation and tools to come up with the best infrastructure for your app, along with an implementation plan.

This is particularly true for eCommerce websites, but any app really could benefit from resource usage optimization.

The most common example here is Black Friday, when shops get significantly more traffic than usual, which can cause pages to load slower or even crash. But random spikes in traffic can happen during the year as well. That’s why, at Bunnyshell, we offer solutions such as automatic scaling and load balancing that enable you to get the best of both worlds: you only pay for what you use without sacrificing performance.

Eliminating downtime also helps reduce other types of costs, such as legal repercussions, for example. One study revealed downtime causes organizations more than $26.5 billion in expenses. When your app is down, your customers’ work is interrupted; sometimes, downtime can even cause data loss. Your customers might get so frustrated that they take their business elsewhere, which translates to increased costs for new customer acquisition.

Another area to keep in mind is tools. Have an overview of everything you’re using and what not – costs for programs, applications, licenses, and plugins can really add up.

Using containers helps reduce the costs associated with running operations. Compared to traditional VMs, containers require smaller amounts of resources (while also providing faster execution), which means they can be operated at much lower costs, they are easier to use because they don’t require an OS or hypervisor, and are highly scalable with lower operational expenses. At the same time, containerization ensures the user experience is always seamless; you can apply software updates without disrupting your service.

With Bunnyshell, you can automate Docker (or other container tools) in your environment to operationalize your container build and deployment process that you’re probably doing manually. You also have a provisioning and configuration tool that can install and configure your containers as needed.

Serverless computing is, probably, the pinnacle of DevOps. This technology enables your organization to take budget savings to a whole new level as you only need to pay for what your app is using. When your app is not in use, there are no resources allocated, and therefore nothing to pay for. Similar to how the bills for utilities work.

AWS is the preferred serverless computing provider in the industry, but Microsoft and Google also offer such services (and Bunnyshell supports all of them).

Every organization has security practices in place, but not many actually enforce them, which leads to security gaps. Breaches are very costly in many aspects, from spending money to find out what has been compromised to securing your infrastructure and paying penalties to your customers.

Implementing DevSecOps practices prevents security breaches and hence eliminates the costs associated with them.

DevOps and automation enable organizations to release software faster and with fewer people, which significantly reduces release costs. An area where automation is particularly helpful is testing. Although we don’t recommend relying solely on automatic testing, most testing-related tasks can be automated. This way, you reduce personnel costs because you need fewer testers, and you free up time for your team to focus on more important tasks.

The DevOps methodology is still in its infancy, so more and more ways to reduce costs will surface as it develops. Still, your organization can save significant amounts of money by following our advice.

Not convinced? Give DevOps automation a try with Bunnyshell. 

Try Bunnyshell now