How to Avoid Over-Sizing of Cloud Resources?

Did you know?

“Approximately 40% of instances were sized at least one size larger than needed for their workloads.”

When consumers migrate to the cloud, they prioritize speed and performance than the cost of the applications. Rushing into migration with oversized or overpowered EC2s may offer better speed and performance, but it will always be too expensive. To avoid overspending, the consumers always lift and shift their environments and expect to right size later.

What is right-sizing?

 Right-sizing your AWS resources is one of the key mechanisms to optimize AWS costs, however, it is often ignored by organizations during migration to the AWS cloud. Choosing the right cloud service, machine type, or instance size is very difficult at an early stage.

cloud resources – sizing

Right-sizing the process of selecting instance sizes and types based on capacity requirements and workload performance at the lowest possible cost. In simple words, it’s a process of eliminating or down-sizing instances without compromising capacity or other requirements of applications, resulting in a decrease in overall costs.

You need to analyze two things continuously – instance performance and usage requirements & patterns  to find out about the idle instances and then right-sizing either poorly matched or overprovisioned instances as per the workload.

Resources you must right-size to reduce the cost of your project

You must be aware of the fact that resource needs keep on changing from time-to-time. This makes right-sizing a continuous process to continually achieve cost optimization. For a smooth right-sizing process, you can establish a schedule for each team to right-size their resources, enforce tagging for all instances, and use AWS monitoring and analysis tools to monitor the usage of all instances and resources.

Here is a list of AWS resources for which right-sizing is necessary are:

#1. EC2 instance types – EC2 offers a comprehensive range of optimized instances to fit different use cases. Instance types include varying combinations of CPU, storage, memory, and networking capacity. Choose the one that meets your requirement. You can calculate EC2 reservation, tenancy and graph options.

#2. AWS storage classes – Amazon S3 allows customers of any size and business to store their data in an organized manner. They can choose any of the following storage class (offered by Amazon S3) according to their workload requirements:

• S3 Standard – This is for general-purpose storage of frequently accessed data;
• S3 Standard-Infrequent Access and S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access for frequently accessed data;
• S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive for long-term object storage;
• S3 Intelligent-Tiering for data with changing or unknown access patterns.

#3. RDS instance types – This provides optimized instances that can fit different relational database use cases. RDS instances include various combinations of CPU, storage, memory, and networking capacity. Cloud customers have the flexibility to choose the perfect database instance type and size based on their target workload.

How to right-size your cloud resources?

1. Analyze instance performance and usage patterns of your application. Track performance records of at least 2-4 weeks to find out about seasonal patterns and spikes.
2. Instance performance is defined by various metrics including CPU usage, memory utilization, network utilization, IOPS, and ephemeral disk use. Monitor and record the capacity of these attributes. Use these readings to compare the consumed resource against the allocated resource.
3. Graph your historic data, instance by instance, and look for points of conflict. Find out the level of utilization of resources during peak hours and midnight backup.
4. Once you’ve all the information, you can select the appropriate sized resources according to the application’s workload.

Tools to avoid over-sizing of resources

Right-sizing your resources is not easy. You need appropriate information about the usage of your instances. You can analyze instances usage to avoid over-sizing of resources and reduce overall cost with the help of AWS tools:

Amazon CloudWatch – It allows you to monitor CPU utilization, disk I/O, and network throughput, and use these readings to find a new and cheaper instance type. You can also use Amazon EC2 Usage Reports to track the performance of instances. These reports are updated several times a day and provide in-depth usage data for all your EC2 instances.

AWS Cost Optimization: EC2 Right Sizing – This helps analyze 2- weeks’ utilization data of Amazon EC2. It also offers recommendations for right-sizing to meet the current demand by lowering the overall cost to run the workload.

AWS Cost Explorer – You can identify under-utilized EC2 instances with the help of AWS Cost Explorer. You can turn-off or eliminate EC2 instances as per the workload. The AWS Cost Explorer also offers Amazon EC2 Usage Reports, which let you analyze the cost and usage of your EC2 instances over the last 13 months.

AWS Compute Optimizer – It gives recommendations for upsizing instances to fix performance bottlenecks, downsizing by analyzing your resources workload. EC2 instances that are parts of an Auto Scaling group.

AWS Trusted Advisor – This helps you identify idle and underutilized resources and provides ‘service usage’ real-time insights. You can use this information to improve your system performance and reliability, increase security, and look for opportunities to save money.

Once you have got the information regarding unused resources, you can always choose right-sized instances to optimize AWS cost.

azure cloud cost optimization

Cloud Strategy and Implementation to Avoid Over Spending

In simple terms, cloud computing is the on-demand availability of services that provides the computing and processing power over the internet. The core idea behind this technology is to help the companies avoid the cost and complexity of maintaining and owning their high power IT infrastructure. The key driving element is that it offers the flexibility to pay for what is being used also known as the “pay-as-you-go” model. The services are available in different dimensions like “Infrastructure as a service”, “Platform as a service” and “Software as a service” etc. Each of this vertical targets a specific requirement and has its pros and cons. The cloud computing services offer huge power and have the potential to offer exponential scalability options at much lower costs as compared to the traditional models. These benefits of the cloud services are not just limited to the IT teams but are extended to the Development, Finance, and all other engineering teams (operations, infrastructure, etc.). While cloud computing at the beginning might look at a one-stop solution for all the business problems, but it all depends on how all the departments work together with clarity about costs and expectations from the technology.

Cloud Service Usage for Migration

One of the common scenarios while working with cloud services is the migration of existing applications over to the new technology. The decision of adopting cloud technology should be done based on existing projects and future innovations. While the cost of utilizing the cloud services would surely be less but the cost to optimize and migrate complex projects might be significantly more.

1. Cloud services are more effective for applications for which usage peaks are measured within a range. The services would have an adverse effect on the overall budget when the majority of servers are sitting idle for long periods.
2. Ineffective utilization of cloud services can lead to a messy web of IT replicas in each team. Everyone thinks they can manage the IT aspect of their projects by using cloud services tools. In the end, this makes the system more complex and quick fixes badly hit the costs involved.
3. Not all developers are proficient enough to understand and handle cloud-based challenges. The services would not be fully utilized if one is not skilled enough to use them.

Limitation of Cloud Services

Cloud services are not a magic wand that will solve all the business and IT related problems. There are restrictions on the usage of cloud services. The planning, strategy, migration, implementation, and mitigation models must be made considering these limitations. If these are ignored, it can imbalance the costing business model.

• The control is solely moved to cloud services. The in-house IT staff or engineering teams rely on the functionality of cloud applications with no or fewer flexibility options.
• Not all features are available in the first go of the cloud service. Different vendors have different offerings. It is of utmost importance that all features are evaluated for service before investing in them.
• Do not plan to go server-less from the beginning. Keep a back-up of few dedicated services too. The downtime of cloud servers and its fixing can, in turn, cause huge losses to the company.

Functions as Service (Serverless Architecture)

This newer technology of serverless computing is disrupting the IT industry. This has provided a new dimension to cloud computing services. Since it is new and fancy to everyone, the organization might want to win the race to be the first one to implement it. The FaaS targets at the architectural level of the applications and thus, it demands higher expertise in designing, running, and managing such applications. Although, it is said that the FaaS service takes off all of this burden, but the ground reality is that there are several challenges attached to it.

• Since it is implemented through a third party, the challenges of multi-tenancy, vendor lock-in, and other security concerns need to be handled. The costs involved for API upgrades or functionality changes can add to the existing budget.
• The control of debugging and monitoring is shifted to the vendors. Moreover, the debugging in distributed systems is always difficult and requires a longer time to resolve.
• The integration and architectural complexities can make things more cumbersome.

While cloud computing is a blessing for many, its effective utilization would determine the life of it in an organization. Clarity of cloud services and the expectations from each one would help to determine the real-time budget and planning for the implementation. The technology is growing and getting mature with each passing day, and the organizations which understand the benefits of cloud computing and investing more time on research and impressive utilization of its services and platforms. The teams should collaborate and support each other to identify the benefits and pitfalls related to each cloud service and its related cost.

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