Gartner forecasts an 18% growth in global public cloud spending this year, an estimated rise from $257.5 billion in 2020 to $304.9 billion. These inflating numbers are the evidence of an ever-rising demand driven by the dismal and disruption brought upon by the pandemic. It’s true that on-premises data centers were not equipped to handle the disruption on such a global scale. But the acceleration in cloud adoption has not necessarily translated into efficient usage of the cloud and the new environment it brings, especially in terms of cost. This year, cloud wastage is expected to hit a whopping $21 billion, which means almost 7% of the cloud spend adds zero value to the organizations.
Can business leaders afford to waste their IT budget recklessly on cloud assets that guarantee no return in this post-pandemic economy?
Fortunately, there are measures businesses can take to mitigate this waste. Rightsizing is one of the ways sought by business leaders to optimize their infrastructure, cost efficiency, and performance. But what is rightsizing?
Rightsizing, in the context of IT, refers to the process of restructuring or reorganizing a company's IT infrastructure, networking, storage, data centers, hardware or other critical components in an effort to get the highest possible value from those services.
~Techopedia
When migrating on-premises workloads to the cloud, companies often feel a pinch in their pockets due to over-provisioned mission-critical applications that continue to consume storage, memory and compute power. It is like hoarding an entire departmental store in your house, fearing a crisis when you might need more food and other essential items. Now, imagine spending the same amount every month as you never want to go out of food in the near future. Overprovisioning your IT resources is equal to this compulsive hoarding, just at a much, much greater scale.
The issue of overprovisioning can be mitigated by rightsizing as it can help businesses find the best configuration to meet the current and future needs. Rightsizing is the science of finding the perfect balance between budget and performance to reduce cloud waste and optimize your cloud spending. Rightsizing does not only reorganize cloud resources but also helps businesses optimize their computer power, load balancing, and choose the right pricing structure to ensure effective performance of their cloud infrastructure at a lower cost.
Here are the three steps organizations take to carry out rightsizing:
|
Step 1: Examine the usage and performance metrics of volumes, VMs, and instances. |
Step 2: Check whether the volumes, VMs, and instances meet the required benchmark. |
Step 3: Based on the result of the analysis, upgrade or downgrade or stop resources. |
That’s the biggest benefit of rightsizing. It protects businesses from hoarding unnecessary cloud resources in fear of the unknown. Rightsizing helps organizations overcome this fear by offering a logical approach in understanding and predicting the exact business needs and configuring the infrastructure accordingly. As a result, it optimizes the cost and the performance of your cloud resources without the risk of being over or underprovisioned.
| Customer | EC2 cost | EC2 Rightsized Cost | Savings | Savings % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | $350,000 | $249,000 | $101.000 | 29% |
| 2 | $1,124,527 | $635,154 | $489,373 | 43.52% |
| 3 | $319,458 | $206,630 | $112,828 | 35.32% |
| 4 | $4,500 | $2,280 | $2,220 | 49.33% |
| 5 | $35,467 | $23,654 | $11,813 | 33.31% |
But is cost optimization the only benefit that rightsizing brings to the table? If not, what are the other possible benefits an organization can achieve by rightsizing its cloud resources? Let’s explore other key benefits of rightsizing -
Optimizing infrastructure
As you start analyzing your cloud infrastructure, you realize that several assets or resources have low utilization in terms of key performance metrics. The best way to understand whether a resource is underutilized or not is to check its performance metrics. Anything below 20% is considered underutilized. When you rightsize such assets to a smaller footprint, you improve its performance besides saving costs. For AWS users, a workload running on a r3.2xlarge can be downsized to a r3.xlarge instance, which can slash down your operational costs by half without affecting the performance.
Reducing cloud waste
Terminating ‘zombies’ is another way of rightsizing your cloud resources. Zombies are those existing assets that users forget to turn off or are failed due to script errors. As a result, they keep running in your environment but hardly being used, racking up the bills as a result and adding to the burgeoning waste. Rightsizing allows you to identify those resources and terminate them, saving you from adding to the increasing cloud waste.
Reducing IT energy footprint
As a direct consequence of reducing cloud waste, businesses can make a significant contribution towards leaving the world a greener place. How? Well, every underutilized resource consumes a considerable amount of energy, which is one of the key concerns for organizations and system architects. By ensuring proper management of resources, businesses can minimize energy consumption and reduce their carbon footprint.
Meeting organizational goals
A number of times, the lack of clarity about their cloud resources leads organizations to follow vendor recommendations blindly. To make matters worse, some of the cloud management tools only offer top-level information about resource and application usage levels. With time, organizations drift apart from their cloud goals and end up wasting their IT budget. Rightsizing does not only offer a clear view of your cloud environment and usage details but also helps you stay aligned with your organizational goals in the long run. It helps you choose the right volumes and workloads to meet your business goals.
Is rightsizing a part of your cloud agenda in 2021? If yes, then connect with our cloud experts who are here to help you rightsize your cloud resources.
