The main challenge of working on a cloud environment is keeping track of your cloud spend- a feat that has been challenging business owners for five years now. Uncontrollable costs almost offset the string of benefits and opportunities provided by operating in a cloud environment.
But, through cloud performance and cost optimization tactics, businesses can gain a clear perspective of their workload to resource allocation and cost spend, allowing them to maximize their cloud infrastructure’s potential.
Let’s find out how…
What is Cloud Management & Optimization?
All companies have different definitions of cloud optimization, depending on the scale and size they operate on. But at its core, cloud optimization is about correctly assessing the infrastructural needs of every app, instance, or workload, and allocating the right amount of resources to each, so as to eliminate wastage and minimize cloud costs.
In order to right size resources, you need to look beyond just the number of apps, workloads, and databases you use for an X amount of time. You also need to understand how all resources work together so that your applications can function at the right capacity, and easily handle demand fluctuations.
Once you are cognizant of your cloud infrastructure, loose ends and improvement opportunities become evident. You can start by rightsizing your resources and eliminating under or overutilization across the infrastructure. You can also take into account the size, industry, location, and scale of your business to identify cloud optimization best practices that are unique to your business.
The main aim of cloud performance optimization is to achieve efficiency in infrastructural workflows so that operating costs are minimized, and application performance is enhanced. This is why cloud optimization isn’t a once-in-a-while procedure, it is a continuous process that involves cloud management as well. Companies need to sustain their optimized state of operations by monitoring, reporting, and analysing their cloud environment.
Why is Cloud Optimization Important?
Cloud optimization introduces great efficiency in business operations. Here are some of the benefits:
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Improved Cloud Cost Management
According to Cloud wards, one of the most prevalent challenges businesses face is managing their cloud spending, with owners complaining that around 30% of their cloud budget goes to waste.
Most pay-as-you-go pricing plans of cloud platforms are complicated to understand and become increasingly difficult to keep track of as businesses scale.
Cloud optimization and management entails continuous monitoring of company data and resources, allowing engineers to stay on top of their cloud usage and the ROI derived from it. With greater infrastructure visibility, they can make a proactive assessment of their resource needs and make utilization decisions keeping the cost involved in mind.
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Greater Visibility & Efficiency
Cloud optimization practices equip companies with an understanding of the architecture on which their IT operations stand. Armed with this knowledge, DevOps teams can look for better ways to conduct their operations. This prompts them to adopt new and better features that boost efficiency while discarding outdated ones. This not only elevates operational efficiency but ensures that companies are extracting the maximum benefits from their cloud platform.
Moreover, with optimization logistics out of the way, DevOps teams can focus on problem-solving tasks that promote efficiency and fuel innovation.
Best Practices for Cloud Optimization
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Scheduling on/off Times
You can schedule the on and off times for instances deployed in non-production areas like development, staging, testing, Q&A, etc. Depending on the work schedules of developers and peak usage times, scheduling on/off times might help save the running costs of these instances considerably.
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Purchasing and Managing Reserved Instances.
Purchasing reserved instances is a straightforward way of reducing cloud costs, provided you’ve accurately calculated your utilization needs. If you purchase the wrong type or end up underutilizing these, you’ll actually end up raising your costs.
To ensure effective management, you can take steps like:
- Implement RIs only for workloads that run continuously.
- Create a centralized account for all RIs and allow teams to utilize resources when the others are not.
- For apps with stable or predictable usage, purchase RIs according to average continued usage.
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Rightsizing Infrastructure and Automating it.
Rightsizing involves matching your workloads to an accurate amount of resources and instances. You can conduct a thorough analysis of resources at hand by taking into account CPU utilization, memory usage, disk space, and network usage. These metrics will help determine whether you need to upsize, downsize, or reallocate resources for different workloads.
One efficient way of conducting rightsizing is automating infrastructure provisioning to eliminate human errors. You can deploy a policy-driven automation system that prevents overprovisioning and alerts you of infrastructure rightsizing opportunities.
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Choose the Right Storage Type.
The type of storage you employ for workloads should be a balance between cost and performance. For example, data backups can be kept in larger, economical, and slower storage tiers. Infrequently required data can also be stored under this type. On the other hand, running applications require fast and expensive storage tiers to maintain high-performance standards.
Because of the continuous and nuanced nature of the cloud performance optimization process, most companies prefer to get a third-party management service on board to handle the entire optimization lifecycle, from inspection to maintenance.
At Hanu, we conduct a 40-point inspection to give you maximum visibility on your cloud budget allocation. We also provide analytically informed resource recommendations to ensure that all your resources are being optimally employed.
If you want to know more about how we can make cloud cost management easier for you, contact us now.
