Overprovisioning in the cloud
Many businesses still maintain an on-premises mentality where the mindset that the cost of running infrastructures is fixed. Unfortunately, that mindset doesn’t translate well to the cloud, where you pay for the resources you provision, regardless of how much of that workload is ultimately being utilized. This issue has been exacerbated by the decentralization of IT due to non-IT departments setting up their own cloud environments to accommodate their specific workloads. This results in overprovisioning of cloud resources, driving up cloud costs and contributing to the total amount overspent in the cloud, and creates a culture of unaccountability.
As an example, it is common for developers to spin up Virtual Machines (VMs) that are larger than necessary. Other common causes of wasted spend include aged snapshots, zombie infrastructure, running resources during non-production hours, etc.
Rightsizing for cloud cost optimization can be one of the most effective ways to reduce the cost of your monthly cloud bill. It allows you to see where you can optimize spend and analyzes the utilization and performance metrics of your infrastructure to determine whether or not they are running efficiently and what actions you should take to improve. These actions include downgrading, upgrading, or terminating the resources.
Rightsizing with VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth
Rather than doing a manual check to ensure your VMs are rightsized, VMware Aria CostTM powered by CloudHealth® (formerly CloudHealth) new rightsizing engine analyzes the workload pattern of your instances, generates recommendations and provides you with faster and better recommendations delivered instantly.
The new rightsizing tool 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. The rightsizing dashboard presents an executive summary that shows you your number of current recommendations along with monthly price and projected monthly savings, and a recommendations table.
Customers have the ability to define custom efficiency targets and select a date range that help generate targeted recommendations. Efficiency targets are a collection of instance usage attributes and utilization ranges that can be applied to meet application or enterprise requirements. These can be set using the following parameters:
- Amazon EC2: CPU, Memory, Disk, Network Out
- Amazon RDS: CPU, Freeable Memory
- Azure VM: CPU, Memory, Disk
The rightsizing tool also gives you an option to view recommendations grouped by Perspective, Account or Subscription.
The recommendations table shows all instances that fit the selected filters and that have a recommendation. You can also enable ‘Show all’ recommendations to view instances that do not currently have a recommendation. The two types of recommendation that you’ll see are Resize that identifies the right size candidate instance that can handle the usage for the current instance and Terminate that identifies instances that have less than one percent memory and CPU utilization and can likely be terminated.
Learn more about VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth
To learn more about VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth, sign up for a 14-day free trial , check out our Resources Center , and take a look at our Tech Zone page where you can watch video demos on our product and the latest features.
