With the rapid incorporation of cloud services into enterprise businesses, it is becoming increasingly imperative yet challenging to balance the right chord when it comes to workload efficiency, performance, cost, and compliance on the cloud. Optimizing cloud costs while ensuring the best-fit infrastructure in real-time is a rising cost management concern.
It is therefore essential for enterprises to comprehend and estimate what and how much of the resources and services are required, in order to leverage the scalability that clouds computing offers. There are numerous cloud cost optimization techniques to control the overall cloud spends and right-sizing is believed to be the most effective of all.
Rightsizing is the process of matching cloud workload capabilities to specific types and sizes of cloud instances to obtain optimal financial savings. To begin with, it monitors and analyses instance performances as well as usage needs and patterns on a continuous basis to eliminate or shut down idle instances. It also ascertains the right-sizing of instances that are either under or over-provisioned to the workload on the cloud. Right-sizing can be implemented across private, public, and hybrid cloud environments.
Let us look at some of the best rightsizing practices that can help reduce cloud costs –
Estimate the cost of stipulated computing services
The first step is to determine the actual requirements of computing services being offered by the cloud service providers. The cost of these services will be directly proportional to the budget of the entire business. Taking the complete business model into consideration, calculate the number of services required on the cloud platform to get an overview of the plan and annual, monthly, or quarterly spends. If the requirements are estimated accurately, the cloud cost would reduce eventually as businesses would work towards purchasing only those exact number of services that are actually required.
Workflow analytics and review
Heedful of the available cloud resources, organizations need to research and evaluate their business needs to identify the amount of deficit or mismatch that has occurred. Analytics dashboards not just depict the cloud services being underutilized but also ensure to recommend a comprehensive solution to right-size the required cloud services in use. The granular statistics and reports highlight the areas of development for a better workflow that would eventually lead to optimum cloud costs and productive usage of resources.
Determine capacity allocation
Business requirements are dynamic and depend heavily on the varying operations and workflows. Determination of optimal business capacity becomes inevitable for effective cloud cost management. Rightsizing works best in such a scenario as it is able to significantly scale up and down the capacity of cloud services as well as configure workflow schedules depending on workload volume and work hours. It recommends purchasing the right number of resources required at present, followed by incorporating more as per future needs. It saves considerable business capital, is really easy to manage, and curbs all unnecessary wastage or over-provisioning on the cloud.
Automate right-sizing
Automation on the cloud enables faster installation, configuration, and management of cloud services universally. It helps automate tasks that reinforce security, business compliance, code deployments, backup, and storage to enhance continuous deployment and delivery. Automation has the ability to determine the services that need right-sizing, allocate resources dynamically to avoid over-utilization, curtail human intervention and errors and save time, enabling organizations to employ their resources alongside automated workflows that can be executed as a single automated process in the long run.
It is evident by now that rightsizing is the key to minimizing cloud costs and data-driven analytical decisions further play a major role in ascertaining the utilization of all involved cloud services at 80% and above capacity, to earn maximum benefits. This, along with fine-tuning of all business resources and virtual machines (VMs), implementing good cloud management practices, and establishing effectual infrastructure on the cloud encourages easy upgrades, faster deployments, and improved TCOs.
Various cloud platforms have the option to return unused resources to the pool, thus, bringing down the costs further.
To conclude, as overallocation of resources may lead to wastage of monetary funds and under-allocation would affect business performances, it is best recommended to embrace rightsizing as a binding tool to attain cloud cost optimization.