One of the most effective ways to reduce your cloud spend is by rightsizing your infrastructure. Rightsizing is the process of analyzing the utilization and performance metrics of your infrastructure, determining whether it is running efficiently, and then modifying the infrastructure as needed. Previously, we highlighted Azure infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) rightsizing by way of Virtual Machines. But did you know that you can save significant money by rightsizing your Azure platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud services as well?
Enterprises burdened by maintaining on-premises databases are turning to cloud database services for the ability to optimize performance, reduce costs, and increase reliability. Microsoft Azure SQL Database is a PaaS offering that is used by developers to design and manage applications.
Although many enterprises are turning to cloud database services for reduced costs, it’s not uncommon for them to be overpaying for databases that are underutilized. Therefore, it’s important to evaluate how well your SQL Databases are being utilized in terms of the workloads you are running on them. As a best practice, you should rightsize to the lowest cost SQL Database that meets your performance requirements, and that’s where CloudHealth comes in.
The CloudHealth Platform offers an Azure SQL Database Rightsizing Report to help you easily gain visibility into how well your SQL Databases are being utilized and the best approach for reducing costs. Within the report, you can create your own custom efficiency target based on DTU (a blend of compute, memory, and IO resources) and Storage utilization thresholds. Your efficiency score is calculated as the total percentage of databases that are a ‘good fit.’ Databases that are not deemed a ‘good fit’ are labeled as underutilized or over target. You can increase your score by rightsizing SQL Databases that are outside of your efficiency target. A new capability that is unique to SQL Database Rightsizing, is that CloudHealth will provide up to three recommendation options with the lowest cost option within your efficiency target marked as your ‘Best Fit.’
CloudHealth gives you the flexibility to customize your rightsizing experience with efficiency targets specific to your business and advanced filtering by dynamic business groupings (a.k.a Perspectives), subscriptions, regions, and more!
