We’ve all heard of the price-performance ratio. Getting the best performance at the lowest cost makes a product much more desirable in the market. Your own organization probably considers it as they are determining how much your audience is willing to pay for a new offering. But have you considered the price-performance of your cloud? Better costs is probably what pulled you into the cloud in the first place. But how is your cloud computing performance? In this post, we’ll look at how your cloud might not be working for you and provide an overview of cloud cost optimization tips.
Why You Might Not Get the Cloud Computing Performance You Need
There are a few reasons why you might not get the performance in the cloud that you need. First, the major cloud vendors put throttles on the fastest speeds that you can get. This ensures that performance stays even across all of their customers. However, if you feel like you need more performance than you’ve been allocated, the vendors will allow you to purchase additional capacity to achieve the level of performance you need. Obviously this isn’t very cost-efficient. You’re literally paying for cloud resources that you cannot use. Unfortunately, a lot of cloud customers end up resort to this practice. According to Gartner, 70% of cloud costs are estimated to be wasted. But if your budget allows for it, it’s one way to improve performance.
But what if we are talking about particularly heavy, database workloads? Databases like Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server live behind other applications your organization uses, and they require ultra-fast performance to complete operations that drive other processes. And no matter how much money you throw at your cloud vendor, you still might not be able to achieve the levels of performance that these databases demand. The clouds were architected for the average. They weren’t created to meet the needs of high-performing workloads.
Quick Wins for Cloud Cost Optimization
Dramatically improving performance over what native cloud can offer you is something that is possible. We will cover how you can do that below. But if you are looking for quick wins to optimize your cloud costs, there are a few tweaks that you can do:
Turn Off Unused Resources
It can be easy to forget to turn off temporarily resources – like Dev/Test environments – when the team is done using them. In the same vein, it can be easy to forget that the team has Scan your environment to see if there are any resources like that that can quickly be shut down. Additionally, if there are resources that don’t need to be on during downtimes – such as after hours or weekends – look to automate those to turn themselves off when not in use.
Turn on Autoscaling
If you’re looking for something a bit more hands-off, you can configure autoscaling capabilities with your cloud vendor. Autoscaling monitors your applications in the cloud and dynamically adjusts their capacity to maintain steady performance as needed. For example, if you host a semi-annual sale on your website and your web traffic increases dramatically, you might expect that you need to manually turn on additional resources to keep the visitor’s experience smooth. But with autoscaler, you can automatically scale up resources so the browsing and check-out process stays smooth and fast for customers.
Choose the Right VM Instance
Compute VM instances have their own highly varied performance limitations. If you’re hitting the caps on IOPS or throughput on your current instance, you might need to upgrade to a more powerful class that gives you enough CPU and memory. There are some application performance monitoring tools that can help make recommendations on which instance type to choose optimize performance.
The Fastest Performance for the Lowest Costs with Silk
If you’re looking for a long-term solution to getting the fastest performance on the cloud, then you need to look at Silk! The Silk Cloud Data Virtualization Platform lives between your applications and the underlying cloud infrastructure. It uniquely decouples performance from capacity so you can achieve greater performance optimization without the need to invest in wasted resources. Silk connects with compute VMs over a higher performance compute network instead of the limited-capacity data network typical of cloud infrastructure. This allows Silk to support more performance-intensive workloads, eliminating the need to oversize compute VMs for better data network performance. In addition, Silk includes a suite of enterprise data services – such as zero-footprint snapshots, deduplication, and thin provisioning – that help to keep cloud resources used to a minimum automatically.
