May Product Updates: Rightsizing, Rightsizing, and more Rightsizing!

This blog is a continuation of our new monthly product update summary series. May 2024 was a busy month at VMware Tanzu CloudHealth, with a significant focus on enhancing our already comprehensive rightsizing capabilities. The product updates released in May include:

• General availability of Actual Cost in Rightsizing Recommendations for the following services:
  • AWS EBS
  • AWS S3
  • AWS ElastiCache
  • Azure VMs
• In Family Rightsizing Recommendations for AWS EC2

• Additional Details Available in Rightsizing Recommendations

• Azure SQL DB Rightsizing Currency Conversion

In addition to what we released in May, we’ve made many additions to our Rightsizing capabilities over the past few months. You can learn more about them in this blog. For more on what we released in the last month, please read on!

Actual cost in Rightsizing recommendations for additional services—General availability

VMware Tanzu CloudHealth has been incrementally adding services for which we support Actual Cost vs. List Price in our Rightsizing tool. In May, support was added for AWS EBS, S3, ElastiCache, and Azure VMs, allowing users to view rightsizing recommendations based on the following two pricing methods: 

• List price—View recommendations based on the listed on-demand price for the service/instance. 

• Actual cost—View recommendations based on the actual usage cost. The recommendations consider the discounts or pricing impacts on the source instance that result from commitment discounts. Any discounts for current instances will be considered within the recommendation.

When viewing recommendations, users can toggle between these two pricing methods. The Actual Cost method will consider the discounts or pricing impacts on the source instance that result from Reserved Instances, Convertible RIs, and Savings Plans. With this addition for AWS EBS, S3, ElastiCache, and Azure VMs, you gain greater visibility into how rightsizing recommendations are calculated with potential costs and savings, and can better plan future budgets and commitment discount choices.

In Family Rightsizing recommendations for AWS EC2

Making rightsizing decisions is not always a straightforward process, but keeping resources within the same family type can help by making changes less complicated. Within Rightsizing recommendations, Tanzu CloudHealth now offers a recommendation for an option within the same instance family as the current instance for AWS EC2. This allows you to consider the implications of reconfiguration because of an instance family change.

When viewing additional recommendation details in the Rightsizing tool, an “In Family” label will be shown on recommendations that belong to the same instance family as the current instance. At least one of the three provided recommendations will be made for an In Family instance. In Family instance recommendations are currently available for AWS EC2, with plans to support additional services in the future. 

Additional details available in Rightsizing recommendations 

When exporting data from the Tanzu CloudHealth platform, our goal is to provide users with as much context as possible and allow you to choose the data fields relevant to your requirements. With this in mind, we have added export functionality in our Rightsizing recommendations to include information on the Perspective and Perspective Group selected via the group by functionality and the Filter panel. We have also added data fields for In Family recommendations (as described above), so you can view the additional details relevant to In Family instances.

We’ve also added more available data to one of our most widely used Rightsizing services, AWS EC2. This will  help customers make better decisions on Rightsizing opportunities. New columns to bring additional relevant information to Rightsizing decisions have been added within the UI. Here you will see additional columns for Instance State, Region, Launch Data, and Total Hours (see below screenshot). These columns will also be available in recommendation exports, along with additional fields detailing Operating System, Autoscaling Group Name, and Tags.

Azure SQL DB currency conversion in Rightsizing

When reviewing Rightsizing recommendations, seeing costs in a currency that is not used in your country of operations can create an extra step when converting that currency. Tanzu CLoudHealth has introduced currency conversion in Rightsizing for Azure SQL DB, a capability already available for Azure VMs. With this addition, users can see recommendations with cost details in their preferred currency.

We’ll be back with another update in July. In the meantime, you can learn more about Tanzu CloudHealth today by visiting our website.

We will also be onsite at FinOps X in San Diego from June 19-22—if you are attending, please stop by our booth and say hello!

About the Author

Dan is Senior Product Marketing Manager for VMware Tanzu CloudHealth & Tanzu Hub. He focuses on overall messaging and enablement, VMware Explore events, dad jokes, and driving the launches of new features. Prior to joining Broadcom, Dan held roles in sports marketing, brand consulting, market research, and earned his MBA from the Carroll School of Management at Boston College.

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