Additional Authors: Lucas Paratore, Sr. Product Manager
Rightsizing is the process of analyzing how well your cloud assets are being utilized for the workloads that you deploy on them. While overutilized assets can hamper the experience of your customers, underutilized assets indicate that you are overpaying for your workloads. Finding the right balance is key to managing costs and performance in your cloud environment.
- But how do you rightsize your GCE environment? To rightsize your GCE VM instances, there are a few things that you need to know.
- You must know the current lifespan of your current GCE based workload and its usage over that time
- Plus, you need to analyze what you should rightsize your workload to. In other words which VM instance will save you the most money or provide the required performance
- Understand what your CPU and memory needs are for that workload. Do you need a high CPU, low memory instance, a low CPU, low memory instance, or could you leverage a standard VM instance instead?
- Also understand how CPU and memory will impact each other and need for a custom VM instance
- Family of VM instances that you want to use
- Impact of all this on the Committed Use Discounts and Sustained Use Discounts
Does all of this sound complicated? Do you have the time required to put in the effort to gather information, analyze every case, and still do your day job? Not to worry. CloudHealth will help you with GCE rightsizing to save time, effort, and money.
Rightsizing made simple
With CloudHealth’s GCE rightsizing functionality, you get a quick snapshot of cost-saving opportunities by using a lower sized VM. Or you can increase performance to make sure your applications get the required resources. This helps you plan your cloud environment more effectively. Also, you can use CloudHealth’s GCE rightsizing functionality to justify not only to your developers but also your CIO on why you need more or less resources.
Granular information at your fingertips
You get all the required information for GCE rightsizing in one single place. No need to export and then analyze the details in cumbersome excel files. Now based on your requirements, you can sort the recommendations based on project, billing account, zone, etc. This helps you plan your focus areas better. You can also rightsize based on either CPU or memory depending on your workload requirement. That way you do not over-provision your resources.
Note: One thing to keep in mind is that adjusting the RAM of an instance could impact CPU utilization (and vice versa). Although these two are typically independent of one another, adjusting one could have an impact on the other depending on the VM instances. Unless you have a clear understanding of the impact of adjusting the CPU or RAM, you should adjust one and then wait at least one full usage cycle before adjusting the other.
Recommendation age for informed decisions
We have now added a new column called ‘Recommendation Age’ in the rightsizing report. This will help you understand whether this recommendation is completely brand new or not. Thus, if you see a recommendation that has been active for a long time, you can be confident that it’s a suitable recommendation for your environment. To make use of these recommendations you can then login to your GCE portal and make the most relevant changes.
Get more details on what the recommendation is based on by clicking on the recommendation itself. Get a 360-degree view before you make any decision. The following image shows those details. You can also observe the CLI command to easily take the necessary steps in Google Cloud.
In summary, we believe the GCE rightsizing recommendations from CloudHealth will help you simplify your GCE journey. It will streamline your options and help you make the right decisions for additional savings or to increase performance to the required limit. If you want to see this in action, contact us by clicking here.
