Rightsizing cloud infrastructure has long been a proven strategy for optimizing overall cost. VMware Tanzu CloudHealth is excited to announce rightsizing support for many additional services.
Two ways to optimize cloud spend
When it comes to FinOps, or cloud cost management, there are two big levers that businesses can pull to optimize the cost of their public cloud infrastructure: rate optimization and usage optimization.
One of the first things an organization should do if they wish to reduce cloud costs, is take advantage of the commitment-based discounts that cloud IaaS providers offer. The major cloud providers (e.g., Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP)) offer a discount on the rate you pay for resources and services if you commit to a specified amount of usage or spending over a period of time.
Tanzu CloudHealth delivers tools to help ease the challenges of commitment discount management, including Amazon Reserved Instance (RI) recommendations for compute and database services, AWS Compute Savings Plans, and recommendations for buying Azure Reservations for all of their reservable services. You can even automate the exchange of AWS Convertible RIs with our Savings Automator.
Taking advantage of these commitment-based discounts to optimize the rate you pay for resources and services should be one of the first steps on a cloud cost optimization journey. Most of the reservations and savings plans today are flexible enough to apply to numerous resources, so it is highly likely they will be used, and result in cost savings.
Cloud usage optimization
The second big lever that businesses can pull to optimize the cost of their public cloud infrastructure is usage optimization. Usage and cost are directly correlated, so the more you use, the more you spend.
Eliminating unused resources with Tanzu CloudHealth is simple and easy—our Health Check Pulse Report will find the zombie assets in your environment and recommend termination. You can even automate termination of unused resources with our no-code policy engine.
But rightsizing the resources that you do need running is a little more complicated. One must analyze the historical usage of a workload to determine if it is oversized or undersized for its average usage. Workloads should also be evaluated at their peak times to ensure the underlying infrastructure can support even the heaviest of usage.
Further, one must understand the future requirements of the workload to know if a change makes sense. Executives can provide this business context, but it is the engineers who will be tasked with using this information in conjunction with past performance analyses to make decisions about rightsizing infrastructure.
Rightsizing with Tanzu CloudHealth
Tanzu CloudHealth understands the complexity around infrastructure rightsizing, therefore, we are committed to delivering engineers the data they need to make good decisions about changing infrastructure.
One of the biggest challenges our customers face is getting engineers to implement recommendations. In fact, the FinOps Foundation reports that this is an industry-wide challenge.
“It is common for engineers to be unaware of cloud costs and to feel that cost is not their responsibility. Engineers may work in an environment where functionality and delivery deadlines are the primary drivers of effort and where the culture of the team reinforces this outlook. If this is where FinOps is starting from, it’s no surprise that engineers may resist being held accountable for cloud costs, even as they spiral out of control.”
—FinOps Foundation, Encouraging Engineers to Take Action
So last year, we introduced a brand-new rightsizing engine, complete with a GraphQL API that enables engineers to programmatically set efficiency targets and consume our rightsizing recommendations. With this new API, Tanzu CloudHealth data can be put in the path of the engineer to facilitate rightsizing. With data available to them, engineers can become more confident in the recommendations and implement those that make sense, given the (future) business context they have.
Our new rightsizing tool is built with an extensive underlying framework that will help deliver support for more services quickly and efficiently. It also features the ability to set custom efficiency targets, tailoring the recommendations to your preferred levels of capacity usage.
The rightsizing dashboard presents an executive summary that shows the number of recommendations, along with monthly price and projected monthly savings, and a recommendations table. Customers can choose a date range to evaluate workload requirements, including the last 7 days, 30 days, 60 days, or previous month.
Tanzu CloudHealth rightsizing recommendations
Customers can drill down into each instance to view usage and compare up to three recommendations for each instance. One of the recommended instances will be designated as a best fit.
A drill down into resources to see additional recommendations
Rightsizing support
Support for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) came first, quickly followed by Azure Virtual Machine (VM) support. Since May, we have added rightsizing support for five additional AWS services: Amazon OpenSearch, Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Redshift. We also delivered recommendations to optimize Kubernetes requests for CPU and memory, on any cloud.
Our new engine now delivers rightsizing recommendations for all of the following resources and services:
- Amazon EC2
- Amazon RDS
- Amazon OpenSearch
- Amazon EBS
- Amazon ElastiCache
- Amazon DynamoDB
- Amazon Redshift
- Azure VM
- Kubernetes requests (on any cloud)
Next up, we are scoping plans to support Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Azure SQL Database (both database transaction unit (DTU) and vCore), and Azure Disk, and Azure Blob storage.
With a robust user interface and a GraphQL API, Tanzu CloudHealth Rightsizing Recommendations are designed to give engineers and cloud operations teams the granularity and flexibility they need from a rightsizing recommendation engine.
Next steps
For more information, read about how to use Tanzu CloudHealth Rightsizing for cost savings, watch our 90-second YouTube video, or reach out to sales for a demo. We look forward to helping you on your cloud cost optimization journey!
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More Content by Amber Gregorio
