How To Reduce Infrastructure Costs With Low-Code

When talking about IT infrastructure cost breakdown, two major factors impact the cost of infrastructure - hardware and personnel costs. The hardware part is obvious, but let's not forget the high cost of maintenance/DevOps as well. Especially when we consider rising developer salaries.

Hardware costs can be optimized by moving your infrastructure to the cloud in one form or another. But you still have to pay a significant amount to your DevOps team.

However, low-code technology is the only solution to optimize infrastructure costs and remove DevOps-related expenses. And this article will show you how.

Reduce Hardware Cost

There are several issues with owning your own infrastructure. And most of them can be solved by moving your infrastructure to the cloud. But before you make such a move, let's see the drawbacks of non-cloud solutions.

PAY IN ADVANCE

The first issue is you have to pay in advance for the non-cloud infrastructure. It might seem like a minor thing because you will end up paying for the hardware either way. However, looking from an opportunity cost perspective, this capital can be better used elsewhere. And for a growing company, cash flow is king.

INFRASTRUCTURE CAPACITY

The second biggest concern is making sure your app works smoothly at all times. This means you can err on the safe side and purchase more capacity than you need. However, you can never make a mistake in the opposite direction because your app will be slow or crash. And you'll be left with a bunch of angry users.

This inevitably leads to overpaying and increases your infrastructure costs.

LOCATION RISKS

When your entire online business depends on a single computer at a single location - it's a reason for panic. This means your business could be down for days (or more) due to any of the following:

• flooding
• power outages
• or simple plain hardware malfunction

Not to mention that you cannot do anything about the latency your users might experience because you're tied to a single location.

So what is the solution?

Cloud Infrastructure Costs

The best way to solve the problems mentioned above is to use a cloud solution. And specifically, low-code cloud technology because it provides all the benefits of the cloud (and more).

PAY ONLY FOR WHAT YOU USE

Instead of committing your capital and reserving extra hardware capacity (just in case you need it), you only pay for what you use. This means that even if you have a single user for months, you only pay for that one user. And only after you get more, only then will you pay more.

ELASTIC CAPACITY

This also brings us to the issue of how fast you can accommodate a sudden increase in your user base. Expanding physical (non-cloud) server capacity is a fairly slow process. Definitely slow enough to make your users frustrated because your service is either extremely slow or completely down.

However, scaling on the cloud is almost instant. This means you can focus on getting more users and expanding your business without any fear of system overload.

Even if you get featured on the biggest news networks and grow your business from a single to a million users (and beyond), low-code technology can handle it easily.

DISTRIBUTED REDUNDANT HARDWARE 

Scalability is not an issue because low-code technology is built on top of cloud services like AWS - the most secure, stable, and scalable infrastructure in the world.

This also means any previously-mentioned location risks are mitigated with a large, worldwide, redundant infrastructure network. And whatever happens to any individual piece of equipment, there are always automatic fallbacks. These redundancies ensure your apps and services are continuously running no matter what.

Reduce DevOps Costs

The difference between "regular" cloud and low-code cloud technology is that it doesn't require any special management.

When using a regular cloud, even though you don't have to worry about hardware management, you still have to handle everything else. But with low-code, all the infrastructure management is hidden and automatically handled by this technology.

This means you don't have to hire a DevOps team and worry about scaling. As your project/app grows, everything is resolved in the background for you.

Engineering Costs

This also holds true for the app itself. You can reduce development time and costs using low-code while developing the app 3-5X more effectively than you normally would using traditional programming.

Even though you have these productivity increases, the app is still completely optimized. This means it is out of the box, ready to scale from one to a million users (and beyond).

And in turn, your team doesn't have to spend any extra time making it optimized (or scalable). They can just focus on creating the best UX experience for your users and developing business logic. Everything else is handled by the low-code platform.

So all infrastructure costs related to…

• Setting it up
• Managing
• Scaling

…simply do not exist when using low-code technology. And this results in a drastic reduction in engineering costs.

To Sum It Up

The best way to reduce infrastructure costs is to use some form of cloud technology. This technology allows you to have access to virtually unlimited resources while only paying for what you use. 

On top of that, low-code cloud technology reduces costs on two fronts - infrastructure and engineering/DevOps.

The reason for that is automatic scalability - your team doesn't have to spend any time architecting or updating your app to make it more optimized/scalable. It is scalable by default.

To Learn More About 8base Low-Code Technology

• Try it out for Free
• Read about the 8base Backend
• Read about the 8base Frontend
• Visit the Community or Documentation
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