IoT solutions and well-designed architecture allow for fast implementation of new features, providing your product a competitive edge.
When those additional features aren't monitored, what happens to costs? When your fleet grows, how do you scale AWS?
Platform managers upgrade and evolve IoT platforms, and cost is the biggest issue.
Common challenges:
Understand the cost of implementing additional feature sets when product owners request them. You're totally deviating from the early estimates when you go through the initial sizing. Sales are higher than anticipated, and business is booming, but your infrastructure can't keep up with demand.You are not alone if any of these situations sound familiar. In this piece, I will discuss a few tried-and-true ways for optimizing your IoT solution so that it may continue to grow without compromising efficiency.
I have been working with Open Systems Technologies (OST) as an Internet of Things (IoT) development consultant to raise company-wide knowledge of cloud cost efficiency. Throughout my five years of IT expertise, I've worked with a broad variety of technology stacks, but I really shine when it comes to developing effective cloud-based services and solutions.
To aid businesses in their transition to the digital age, OST collaborates with them as an AWS IoT core Competency Partner. With a track record of over 20 years of successful corporate technology, OST is well-equipped to assist firms in improving their core competencies.
Internet of Things (IoT) Cloud Expenses: Invisibles Are Hard to Keep Track Of.
Never let the cost be a variable based on speculation while managing a connected product solution, whether it's a greenfield or brownfield site. Utilizing AWS Cost Explorer is the quickest approach to enhance transparency and set a cost baseline for each specific AWS IoT core setup. With this tool, you may break down expenditures for a specific interval with a level of detail that suits your needs.
An illustration of a cost breakdown could resemble this:
In this section, we will examine the overall cloud expenditure for five distinct services during the period of three months, as well as "Others," which comprises services that were grouped together due to their relatively low cost impact compared to the five services mentioned.
In this specific case, cost changes could be caused by a number of things, such an increase in customer interactions or an extension of the fleet. To find improvement opportunities and evaluate the efficacy of your optimization efforts, it is crucial to have a basic grasp of cost. This is the most important thing to remember.
How do you begin to optimize your cloud spend now that you have a handle on it?
IoT Strategy: Define and Align Your Approach
Defining a clear plan and outcomes as early as possible and as frequently as required is a critical step to take. You should make it a point to answer crucial questions such as the following when you are reviewing your cost statistics and strategy:
To what extent do the data that we are collecting tell the story that we anticipated?
What is a reasonable price per unit that we should strive to achieve?
• Is the growth of our fleet exceeding our current projections?
• Right now, where are we, and where do we wish to go in the future?
The most efficient method for achieving alignment with your objectives is to first engage in a planning session, and then to maintain frequent contact with one another.
Take Control of What You Measure for Your Internet of Things Cloud Platform
After the goals have been aligned and a framework for review has been developed, it is time to conduct an in-depth investigation into the services that are causing the most expense. Among the most prominent areas of concern are the following:
It is important to keep in mind that the most effective strategy for reducing your cloud spending might not be to focus on the higher costs first. To begin, conduct an analysis of the high-cost services that are currently being utilized by your platform and make any necessary adjustments.
To give you an example, you may choose if event-based messaging or time-based messaging is the more appropriate approach for your solution. Costs are directly proportional to the size and frequency of the message. If you find that you are publishing in excess of the required number of messages, you should consider delivering the data only when there is an active customer or use case.
Inquiries concerning event processing may give rise to additional conversations concerning whether or not your traffic patterns indicate workloads that are predictable or whether or not on-demand would be a more suitable option. Any kind of pattern might be observed in the way that you access your data. It's possible that you may make use of clever tiering for your storage needs.
By gaining an understanding of your workload patterns in relation to the utilization of AWS Lambda, you can gain insights into the potential allocation of resources. A reduction in the number of Lambda invocations and an improvement in Lambda's performance are two other ways to save costs.
For the purpose of drawing relevant conclusions and ensuring that stakeholders have an easy time comprehending technical topics, one recommendation is to visually display your cost breakdowns. Through the provision of an interactive dashboard and visually appealing visualizations, Amazon QuickSight makes it possible for any individual to participate in the cost journey.
By enhancing the transparency of the costs associated with the Internet of Things cloud platform and addressing it on a regular basis, new ways to save money can be found.
Invest in internet of things cost optimization impact
The overarching goal of cost optimization is to generate a meaningful competitive advantage while simultaneously pleasing your consumers by giving experiences that enrich their lives. This can be accomplished by presenting them with new and exciting opportunities. Your team will be able to make investments in new features by utilizing the savings that are obtained via successful cost optimization. Your firm will be able to expedite IT spend cycles and invest in iterative innovation while simultaneously controlling targeted objectives if it ensures that there is alignment around cost minimization. Modifications are able to assess momentum since they are managed through important turning points in the development process. As an illustration, if you deploy a product that is not having the impact that you desire, you have the ability to take back that item, which will immediately free up cash that may be invested in other areas.
Optimizing IoT Cloud Costs as a Game-Changing Innovation
It is important to put your optimization options to the test after you have decided on them. The capacity to come up with ideas and test them in safe settings is a big selling point of cloud-based solutions. There will be more room for unique features in the future if we build a better solution now. If you want to strike a better balance between optimization and potential, you shouldn't be scared to re-architecture or integrate a new service. By sticking to the schedule of agile architecture cycles, you can be sure that you will be able to use newly released services and features.
Case Study: Traeger Grills
OST has solved several optimization challenges in many sectors and IoT dashboard solutions. Traeger Grills' cost optimization initiative required OST's extensive knowledge.
The Traeger Grills brand is famous for smokers, grills, and barbecues. After entering the connected products industry in 2018, fleet expansion and grill-to-cloud contact raised cloud spend.
They migrated over 110,000 devices to AWS from their prior cloud service provider.
If replatformed, their IoT data storage might reach 3 zettabytes by 2023. OST's cloud and cost optimization skills reduced Traeger's initial re-platforming objective of $6 per device to $.50 per device.
OST and Traeger used Amazon API Gateway, AWS AppSync, and AWS Lambda to optimize the solution. Workload trends for AWS Lambda usage might help you allocate resources. Cutting Lambda invocations and optimizing speed can reduce costs. According to Traeger Grills Director of Cloud, IoT, and Data Ryan Tarver, AWS and OST cloud and IoT dashboard services are pre-architected to manage and consider growth, allowing us to scale.
Keep Going Despite IoT Cloud Costs
As your company develops and integrates increasingly complicated services, pricing concerns can get lost in the rush to release new features and grow the fleet. IoT prices can grow out of control, making high costs the norm rather than an opportunity for improvement.
Cost will always be a factor in platform management. AWS IoT core services accelerate development and deployment and promote transparency.
Conclusion
Your Internet of Things strategy should be defined and aligned, and you should create and disseminate relevant visualizations. Establish baseline measurements.
Determining improvements and putting them to the test
You will be able to gain an edge over your competitors and reinvest the funds you save into consumer-focused innovation if you put these principles into action. You will also be able to gain more insight into your costs, expedite your strategy, and effectively optimize your cloud spend.