Whenever one plans to shift their IT infrastructure to the cloud platform, they always emphasize speed and overall performance, apart from cost. But, do you know there is a simple solution to your performance, price, and speed problems? Right-sizing of your cloud services!
For some, cloud waste is a myth, but it is REAL. And oversizing can harm your business in the longer run. Everyone is familiar with the term IDLE RESOURCES, but organizations still tend to ignore the fact that they negatively affect your performance and cost of the cloud.
Choosing oversized or overpowered EC2s will absolutely help you enjoy improved speed and better performance. Well, that will get costly, for sure.
What is right-sizing?
Rightsizing is simply explained as an effective technique and one of the crucial aspects of achieving cloud cost optimization throughout the variety of available cloud services/environments that include public, private, or hybrid. Although, organizations usually overlook this aspect while migrating to the cloud. You can call it a method solely purposed for getting rid of or simply down-sizing instances to reduce overall costs without decreasing the quality and capacity.
You can accomplish cloud rightsizing by finding the cloud instance sizes and types compatible with the particular cloud workload capacity and overall performance demands of the business incessantly. It would help if you looked into built-in auto scaling specs, as well. Considering these functional capabilities will help you in rightsizing, avoiding over-provisioning and money wasted on idle instances.
Keep two factors under all-time surveillance: instance performance and usage requirements. Once you have found a pattern, you can quickly point out the idle instances.
Importance of Rightsizing Cloud
Helping the organization scrutinize the suitable cloud infrastructure considering the size/magnitude of on-premises IT infrastructure.
Investigating cloud’s efficiency and efficacy
Nonstop evaluation of the chosen or provided cloud environment.
Considering utilization and performance of the cloud, helps you upgrade, downgrade, or terminate cloud infrastructure.
Comprehending the organization’s need for resource use & the pattern of particular resources’ usage.
Factors Causing Wrong Sizing or Over Sizing of Cloud Resources
Migrating all of your resources to the cloud platform (online) with no basic knowledge of optimum on-premises resource usage of the organization
Over-provisioning caused due to the calculation of the use and patterns of resources merely on the basis of the peak usage time (days/months) instead of focusing on average usage capacity
Underestimating the capabilities of cloud resources, but in reality, they are brilliant, absolutely more well-organized than the on-premises IT structure. This causes oversizing when you calculate the resource size depending on the company’s on-premises resource size.
If you fail to recognize and categorize the unnecessary, idle, and incompetent resources before cloud migration
Overprovisioning is a consequence of believing that the organization’s on-premises infrastructure is appropriately and evenly distributed
Ways to avoid oversizing your cloud resources
There are multiple ways, but here are the most feasible and efficient as well as practically applicable ones:
Always keep instance performance with usage patterns of the chosen application under close monitoring. Track and analyze performance records for a minimum of 4 weeks. It will help identify seasonal increases or decreases in patterns. But, honestly speaking, you must be monitoring ALL THE TIME! Unable to monitor and evaluate resource usage over time can lead to oversizing. Besides, what is the purpose of leaving “zombie” resources processing unmonitored?
Always keep historical data saved in the form of graphs. It must be done “instance by instance.” Keep the focus on the points of conflict. For example, identify the usage level or pattern of resources in peak hours & midnight backup. Once you are provided with the detailed information, you will be able to pick suitable and adequately sized resources depending on the application’s workload.
For effective costing strategies, you should be analyzing monthly costs. It must include compute, and storage cost. With the acquired expenditure data, you can plan your cloud cost for a month or a year.
If you are not tagging your resources, this is the biggest mistake. You should always be tracking your cloud resources’ performance. One of the best practices in cloud migration is to tag your resources. It can be done based on projects as well as organizational units. This helps allocate the costs properly to the corresponding services.
You can define the instance performance with several metrics such as CPU or ephemeral disk usage, IOPS, memory or network utilization, etc. You must examine the capacity and keep track of these attributes. And then utilize the records for comparing the consumed resources with the organization’s allocated resources.
Try following the lift and shift approach. It is based on the procedure where you lift the workload and shift an exact copy of the data to the cloud. There might be a few changes. It is beneficial if you want to speed up the process. But at the same time, it might lead to suboptimal resources’ usage. To get the best resource utilization, you must think about rearchitecting your solution for the cloud.
Try taking advantage of serverless and container orchestration platforms. Services deployed to a container (Kubernetes or Fargate cluster) can aid in shifting much more resources to a single server instance because of the dynamic port mapping. Moreover, it is relatively compact, made in layers.
First, check the bulk of data you need to shift and then select the right storage option. Categorizing your company’s information on their confidentiality and importance can help in loading extremely critical data separately in the advanced or more developed tier of data storage whereas, the less important data will be stored in the lesser tier of cloud storage services.
Never ignore the vital role of VMs! Always start with right-sizing the VMs as scaling up in a specific class of VM is restricted. Whenever you feel like your demands are changing, you need to scale up your VM. So, why not pick a VM that seems compatible with your future professional needs beforehand. This step will keep you safe from wasting money on upgrading in the near future.
Tools to avoid over-sizing of resources
Amazon CloudWatch
AWS Cost Optimization: EC2 Right-Sizing
AWS Cost Explorer
AWS Compute Optimizer
AWS Trusted Advisor