Cost optimization is a continuous effort from application inception (proof-of-concept to its implementation and post-production). You need to continuously review architectures and cost-saving efforts.

In this chapter, you learned about design principles to optimize costs. Before making any purchase decision, you should consider the total cost of ownership for the entire life cycle of software or hardware. Planning a budget and keeping track of forecasts help you to stay on the cost optimization path. Always keep track of your expenditures and look for possible opportunities for cost optimization without affecting user experience or business value.

You learned about the various techniques for cost optimization, which include reducing architectural complexity by simplifying enterprise architecture and setting a standard that everyone can follow. We recommended avoiding duplication by identifying idle and repeated resources, and take consolidation effort to negotiate the cost of bulk purchase. Apply standardization across the organization to limit resource provision and develop a standard architecture. Tracking data for your actual costs against budgets and forecasts can help you to take proactive action. You learned about various reports and alerts that can help to control costs. You also learned about cost optimization in the cloud, which can help you further to optimize value.

Automation and agility are some major factors that increase resource efficiency, and DevOps can provide a great deal of automation. In the next chapter, you will learn about various DevOps components and DevOps strategies to efficiently deploy your workload in the most automated way.