Rightsizing (also right-sizing, right sizing) is a key tactic for optimizing cloud environments. When speed and performance are prioritized over cost, rightsizing brings things back into line and back on budget.
Rightsizing vs. Cloud Cost Optimization
These terms are often used interchangeably and it’s easy to see why. Rightsizing is just one tactic of cloud cost optimization. Its processes can include everything from license use to contract negotiation.
Rightsizing involves matching instance types and sizes to workload performance and capacity requirements at the lowest possible cost. It’s also the process of identifying opportunities to eliminate or downsize without compromising capacity or other requirements. The result? Lower cloud costs.
Rightsizing as a concept can apply to any cloud environment, but it’s important to note that the term “right sizing” is used primarily in AWS cloud language.
The 3 Benefits of Rightsizing Your Cloud
Cost savings + Infrastructure optimization = An easy-to-manage environment
1. Rightsizing Your Cloud Saves Money
Cost is a key concern when it comes to the cloud. Fortunately, reducing wasted expenditure is the biggest advantage of rightsizing. According to AWS, you can save as much as 70% on your monthly cloud bill. However, in our experience the savings to be made on established, well-managed cloud environments are near the 40-60% range. But still, that’s a huge monthly saving that you can use to reinvest in your IT.
There could be any number of opportunities to optimize that you don’t know about. Most cloud management tools only give you a surface-level view of usage levels. Underutilized servers could be costing you money and you’d never know.
For instance, if your organization uses multiple r3.2xlarge workloads in AWS, rightsizing shows you where these assets are and whether they’re needed. If it’s surplus to requirements, the workload can be downgraded to save money.
This small example, replicated across every asset in your cloud environment, leads to more savings. And because the cloud is a flexible, live environment, monthly rightsizing exercises will always find something new.
2. Rightsizing Helps You Understand Your Cloud Needs
Many organizations take vendor recommendations and deploy cloud resources and applications without understanding how best to use them to achieve their own operational goals. Every cloud environment is unique, so what works for others may not work for you.
Rightsizing gives you a clear view of the type of cloud resources you should use in your infrastructure. Rather than blindly adhering to vendors, you can choose the right type of workloads and volumes that meet your business needs.
3. Your Cloud is Easier to Manage
Rightsizing gives you a clear picture of your cloud environment and how it’s being used. Best practice demands that you undertake rightsizing exercises monthly. Combined, this means you have better control over your cloud without compromising on the flexibility and convenience that makes the cloud such an asset.
How to Rightsize Your Cloud Environment
There are three steps to performing a rightsizing exercise on your cloud.
- Analyze the usage and performance metrics of your volumes, virtual machines, and instances.
- Check whether they meet your performance benchmark. Are they maximizing performance constantly or are there unused resources?
- Upgrade, downgrade, or terminate cloud resources based on the results of your analysis.
Cloud Rightsizing Metrics to Measure
The key compute utilization metrics to consider while rightsizing are:
- vCPU
- Memory
- Network
- Disk use
We recommend that you set pre-defined benchmarks for what constitutes normal behaviour for each of these metrics. This will allow you to safely scale up or down without impacting performance.
Cloud Cost Optimization From Cass
Rightsizing is just one element of cloud cost optimization. Taken as a whole, this service has a transformative impact on how you use your cloud environment and how much you’ll spend.
But why not see for yourself? Our 90-day cloud audit includes rightsizing exercises that can see you making savings in just 90 days.
Topics: Cloud Management Services
