When we started discussing simple ways to optimize a cloud environment, we had a brainstorming session. Our objective was to find the best ways to optimize a cloud environment quickly and easily, and make sure we finished with an odd number—apparently the brain absorbs information better in odd-number batches.
We decided on 5 simple ways to optimize your cloud environment. Not because we thought of 6 and left one off the list, but because we thought of dozens and felt the tagline “Dozens of Simple Ways to Optimize Your Cloud Environment” didn´t imply “simple” enough. Furthermore, the 5 ways we chose should do the trick if you are struggling with optimizing the cost and performance of your assets.
1. CloudHealth Usage and Performance Reports
CloudHealth usage and performance reports provide the information you need to understand what happened, how it happened and what you can do to prevent it from happening again (unless it was something positive that happened, in which case you can find out how to repeat it).
In order to accurately represent the usage, infrastructure inventory, performance, availability, security and cost across your environment, CloudHealth collects data at both granular and macro level across CPU, memory, network, disk, IOPS, throughput, and more.
The data is correlated, analyzed and displayed across a single, user-friendly pane – enabling you to evaluate your cloud infrastructure in minute detail to better understand resource utilization at application level and at workload level, and in the context of your entire cloud environment.
2. CloudHealth Perspectives
The next step on from CloudHealth usage and performance reports is CloudHealth Perspectives. CloudHealth Perspectives enable you to create unique business groups that reflect different sets of data for analysis and evaluation criteria.
Perspectives enable you to create reports from both an operational and a business point-of-view.
With this flexibility, you can see your cloud ecosystem by workload, environment, customer, department, or COGS. You can also use CloudHealth Perspectives to report to finance, engineering and operations departments in order to align your cloud infrastructure with business metrics.
3. CloudHealth Professional Services
If the usage and performance reports and the Perspectives feature looks a little complicated at first (you will get used to it, we promise), you can take advantage of our CloudHealth Professional Services to put your cloud(s) through a “Health Check.”
Our Professional Services Team are experts in cloud management and, will identify unused or incorrectly provisioned assets and any other areas in which you could save time and money. It is very likely that our professional services team has already helped your peers stabilize their cloud management and thus have a rich experience trove that you can benefit from.
The team will also guide you through the infrastructure rightsizing service and suggest best practices for creating and enforcing cloud management policies. This service can be provided as a one-off service, or as a regular, ongoing event in your calendar.
4. CloudHealth Rightsizing
The CloudHealth Rightsizing Reports present an overall score of your cloud efficiency based on an analysis of utilization, cost and performance. The reports make recommendations about where assets can be downgraded or terminated to optimize costs, or upgraded to optimize performance.
However, rightsizing is not only about identifying incorrectly provisioned resources. The reports can help you identify zombie assets such as unattached storage volumes. You can also identify assets that should be upgraded to burstable instances or placed on a Reserved Instances pricing plan.
One of our clients used the CloudHealth Rightsizing Service and saved more than $3,000 per month by terminating hundreds of unattached EBS volumes. He was able to save a further $6,000 per month by downgrading RDS instances and using Reserved Instances. You can read the case study here.
5. CloudHealth Policies
The last of our 5 Simple Ways to Optimize Your Cloud Environment isn´t so much about the optimizing process, but ensuring that – once optimized – your assets remain optimized. This is an important process, because you do not want to be repeating the optimization processes with an annoying frequency.
The CloudHealth Policy Engine enables you to create policies that automate the governance of your cloud environment. The policies need not only be applied to cost and performance. They can also be applied to security and incident management.
Therefore, as well as alerting you to assets not being fully utilized, suitable for scheduling on/off times, or managing Reserved Instances, the policy engine can also alert you to unencrypted storage volumes, instances with unauthorized open ports and logins from unrecognized IP addresses.
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