If you pay thousands of dollars for 20–100 users. Then welcome to the world of technical debt.
It was around 2019, we had a sudden traffic surge in our tool. The developers who had built the tool had no clue about scalability. This thereby led to disaster. I still remember when we launched the device, we had to scale around 20 Ec2 instances, leading to a cost of 10k USD just for 2 weeks. With a traffic of only 20–30 users per sec.
Please note this is not a technical blog, just a guide on how can business owners save money with Cloud
Now that's scary if your cloud cost eats up your profit margin, then this is something you need to fix ASAP.
In today's blog, we discuss how you can build a SaaS product with zero cloud cost. In this blog, we primarily consider AWS and Google Cloud to keep the blog concise.
Before we move forward, a small brief on myself, I have been leading startups for 7+ years. Recently I started my consulting firm, where we have built more than 6 products and helped more than 10+ companies in scaling and product development.
Now I won't get into the technical details as this is gonna be a non-technical blog. Let's get started with AWS by understanding how we can save money.
Saving Money with Cloud Services
In the below points, we talk about how we can implement different methodologies to save money for your organization. By the end of this blog, we will discuss some amazing and unique ways you spend zero dollars and build your SAAS product.
1. Embrace Serverless Architecture:
serverless saves money
If you are not building something that has a processing time of less than 15 minutes, then you must definitely try going with serverless architecture. Serverless architecture allows you to run applications without managing the servers. Leveraging serverless platforms like AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, or Azure Functions, you pay only for the actual usage, eliminating the need for continuously running servers. By utilizing these services judiciously, you can significantly cut down on your operational costs.
2. Enable Smart monitoring:
cloud alarms are awesome
I know at this point you might ask that you still would be paying for building your product, so how does it exactly match the title of the blog?
But just wait the best part is yet to come.
Well, how do you know if your cloud costs are exceeding your budget?
a. AWS CloudWatch Alarms: Amazon CloudWatch Alarms are a powerful tool to monitor AWS resources and application performance in real-time. Startups can set up alarms based on various metrics like CPU usage, storage utilization, or data transfer. When a specified threshold is breached, an alarm triggers, notifying the team via email, SMS, or a custom action. and Azure.
b. Google Cloud Monitoring (Stackdriver) Alarms: Google Cloud Monitoring, also known as Stackdriver, offers monitoring and logging services for GCP. Stackdriver Monitoring allows startups to create custom alerts based on metrics like CPU utilization, network traffic, and storage usage.
c. Azure Monitor Alarms: Azure Monitor helps startups keep track of the performance and availability of Azure resources. By setting up alerts based on metrics like VM CPU usage, storage transactions, or database throughput, Azure users can proactively manage costs.
By implementing these cloud-specific alarm solutions, startups can effectively monitor their cloud usage, identify inefficiencies, and optimize costs in real time. Proactive cost management ensures that startups can allocate their resources efficiently, enabling them to invest in the growth and development of their core business functions.
Now Coming to the main point which is availing Credits in clouds.
AWS Activate
aws activate program
This is a program by Amazon Web Services (AWS) designed to provide startups with the resources and support they need to build and scale their businesses. Within AWS Activate, there are specific tiers like “Founders” and “Portfolio,” each tailored to meet the unique needs of startups at different stages of development.
AWS Founders: Under this program, you get 1000$ credits from AWS. Imagine you incur a cloud billing of 900$ and that's paid by AWS. How cool would that be, right?
AWS Portfolio: Under this program, you can easily get up to $100k USD of credits. Different countries have different rules on how they can avail of these credits. So you guys might need to read the official documentation of AWS activate to talk to their support. In one of my previous startups, we used these credits and it saved us thousands of dollars.
Google Cloud for Startups
As per Google, we see that Google provides 200k USD of credits, which you can utilize over a time of 2 years. Think of it more like you not paying until your cloud cost incurs a bill of 200K Dollars.
Now you need to apply for Google Cloud for startups by clicking on this link.
Microsoft for Startups:
You can easily get up to 150k USD without paying a single rupee.
Microsoft for startups
That was the main crux of the blog to avail these clouds for startups. Just make sure to follow steps 1 and step 2 to ensure that your credits are not exhausted soon.
We at Surge Startup, consult startups with their cloud infrastructure and help them with their product development.
To date, we have helped 10+ startups and companies in their cloud infrastructure. If you think we have a query feel free to reach out to us at abhi@surgestartup.com or ping me at LinkedIn.
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