Rightsizing Overview
During a rightsizing analysis of their infrastructure, organizations discover assets that can be downsized or terminated in efforts to save money or upgrade to improve performance. AWS Rightsizing is one of the most effective ways to control cloud spend for optimizing AWS costs. The two key benefits of rightsizing are infrastructure optimization and cost reduction.
The first step in rightsizing is to monitor and analyze your current use of services to understand usage patterns and instance performance. For example, if you are running a workload on a r3.2xlarge but determine via rightsizing analysis that you could downgrade the instance type to a r3.xlarge instance without negatively impacting the workload, you can cut your operating costs by 50%.
How VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth Can Help
VMware Aria CostTM powered by CloudHealth® (formerly CloudHealth) new Rightsizing tool now supports rightsizing for Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and provides faster and better recommendations instantly as compared to the legacy rightsizing tool. The new Rightsizing engine is built with an extensive underlying framework that will help deliver support for more services quickly and efficiently. It leverages the GraphQL API to get a summary of all Rightsizing recommendations.
Using Rightsizing you can:
- Analyze the workload patterns of your instances.
- Apply custom efficiency targets to generate recommendations for optimal instance sizes. and to meet different application and enterprise requirements.
- Gain clear insight into your total cost saving opportunities.
- Fine-tune instance sizing based on up to two additional recommendations.
Rightsizing Dashboard View
The Rightsizing Dashboard provides information about the efficiency of your instances, displays the status of each instance, and provides recommendations for each instance. This includes:
- Current Recommendation: the total number of recommendations available in the dashboard.
- Current Monthly Price: the sum of the monthly cost for all instances.
- Projected Monthly Price: the monthly cost when the best fit is applied to all instances.
- Projected Monthly Savings: the difference between Projected Monthly Cost and Current Monthly Cost. This is calculated by subtracting the Projected Monthly Savings from the Current Monthly Cost.
Efficiency targets are a collection of instance usage attributes and utilization ranges that can be applied to meet application or enterprise requirements. Rightsizing includes two default efficiency targets: Average Metrics and Maximum Metrics.
You can also create a custom efficiency target by choosing metrics such as CPU, Memory, Disk and Network Out. You can select whether the metric should be defined by average performance (Avg) or limit the metric from going beyond a maximum value (Max) and define the target threshold range in values from 1 to 100.
The Recommendations table shows all instances that have a recommendation and fit the selected filters. You can enable “Show all” under Recommendations to view all instances that do not currently have a recommendation. Along with the recommendations, the table also displays a classification system for the instances based on their fit.
- Good fit: the instance meets all efficiency targets, i.e., both the average CPU and Average Memory utilization range fall within their target ranges.
- Under target: the instance is underutilized and does not meet all efficiency targets. VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth provides a recommendation to optimize the instance. Either Average CPU utilization or Average Memory utilization falls below its target range.
- Over target: the instance is overutilized and exceeds one or more efficiency targets. Either Average CPU utilization or Average Memory utilization exceeds its target range.
- Undetermined fit: one or more of the metrics is above target, and one or more of another metrics is below target, so the fit could not be determined.
- Not enough data: there was no data available for a metric for the selected time, so the fit could not be determined.
The recommendations table also displays information about the current price, recommended price and estimated savings.
Key Features
- Data Consumption: Data is accessible via the UI and a new GraphQL API.
- User Interface: Summary dashboard that includes current recommendations, current monthly price, projected monthly price and projected monthly savings.
- Speed: Delivers recommendations in seconds.
- Upsizing Recommendations: Unlike the legacy EC2 Rightsizing tool that only provides downsizing recommendations, the new tool recommends upsizing if an instance is ‘over target.’
- Customization: Customers define custom efficiency targets for utilization directly in the rightsizing tool. Equal weight is applied to all metrics.
- Alternate Recommendations: The new rightsizing engine presents one “best fit” instance recommendation and up to two alternate recommendations.
- Comparing “apples to apples”: Currently, the tool compares list price of a current instance to list price of a recommended instance.
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