Rightsizing Cloud: Optimize Performance and Manage Costs – What is rightsizing? Rightsizing is an effective method to achieve cloud cost optimization across various cloud environments (public, private, hybrid). By continually matching cloud instance types and sizes to specific cloud workload capacity and performance requirements, cloud rightsizing is achieved. Especially in pay as you go public cloud environments like AWS, Azure and GCP with in-built autoscaling capabilities, effective rightsizing prevents over provisioning and idle instances.
First, let’s discuss in detail the rightsizing of a cloud environment and subsequently dive into the benefits and best practices of cloud rightsizing.
Rightsizing is the process of upgrading, downgrading, or terminating the cloud resources based on its utilization. This is done based on the type and size of the workload handled by that particular cloud resource or virtual machine. The type and size of the workload determines the required capacity of the virtual machine on your cloud. This helps to understand if you have to upgrade or downgrade your virtual server. Rightsizing is also dependent on the duration of utilization of your virtual machine. The active time period of your virtual machine determines if and when it has to be terminated. This helps in removing unnecessary cloud instances that are created to complete certain tasks. For example, your developers and testers would have created some instances to develop and test certain functionalities based on project requirements. These instances may not be used later. Such instances have to be terminated.
The rightsizing of cloud is important because it helps in:
Rightsizing of cloud helps in:
You should not just consider cost as the main factor in rightsizing your cloud infrastructure. If you choose the least expensive option, your cloud infrastructure might face performance and availability risks. Instead, you have to consider the average usage of the resources along with the core metrics for the VMs. The core metrics for the VMs include vCPU utilization, network utilization, memory utilization, and disk use. You can’t downsize your VMs based on just vCPU utilization when the utilization of other metrics are on the higher side. If you do so, it will lead to poor performance of your VMs on the cloud.
The other best practices include:
The most common strategy followed among all the cloud providers is to provide a range of instances to choose from based on your requirements. These VMs come in different combinations of CPU, disk capacity, memory, and network resources. They also provide tools to monitor and gauge the average resource utilization over a period of time to find out the right-sized instance required for your cloud environment.
The rightsizing recommendations feature in AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Trusted Advisor are two useful tools to help manage cloud costs by identifying opportunities to right size cloud provisioning. These tools scan for underutilized EC2 instances in member accounts and help downsize or terminate them.
Azure Cloud Advisor is similar to AWS Trusted Advisor but for the Azure Cloud. It analyzes cloud resource and usage data to help make recommendations that help performance, cost, reliability and security of your Azure provisioning and deployments. The performance and cost recommendations specifically are targeted to help right size cloud usage.
Rightsizing of your cloud environment is essential to optimize performance and cost. This will help improve your operations, development, and testing activities. You can also serve your customer in a better way as all the VMs will perform at optimum level. AWS, Azure, and GCP provide many instances and innovative technology to help achieve rightsizing of your cloud environment.
For more information you can refer to the following articles: