What's New in Rightsizing in VMware Tanzu CloudHealth

In March of 2024, The FinOps Foundation announced an update to the FinOps Framework. Within that Framework, each domain is meant to describe a set of business outcomes that a mature FinOps practice should ultimately strive for. As an individual customer’s cloud usage grows and as they progress through their own cloud journey, they will end up working through their challenges in each of these domains. However, each customer’s cloud journey is rarely linear, and maturing is never easy.    

As part of the FinOps Foundation’s 2024 State of FinOps Report, one of the Key Priorities of FinOps Practitioners is reducing waste or unused resources. For a customer’s FinOps practice, the ultimate goal is to get the most out of every dollar of cloud spend. In the Optimize Cloud Usage and Cost domain, which is focused on practices like cloud sustainability, architecting for the cloud, rate optimization, and workload optimization, customers begin to target the dollars that aren’t making a difference in the form of these wasted, unused or underused resources.  

^{Source: https://www.finops.org/insights/key-priorities-shift-in-2024/}

At its core, VMware Tanzu CloudHealth seeks to partner with customers and aid them throughout their own cloud journey, including the Optimize Cloud Usage and Cost domain of the FinOps Framework. Already this calendar year, Tanzu CloudHealth has shared several substantial improvements and enhancements to our workload optimization capabilities to help customers reduce waste or eliminate unused resources. These include the following, which are all generally available:

• AWS S3 Rightsizing
• AWS Graviton For EC2 Cross-Architecture Recommendations
• In-Family Recommendations
• Export Recommendations with Perspective Information
• Actual Cost vs List Price in Rightsizing Recommendations (AWS EC2 & EBS, Azure VM)
• Google Kubernetes Engine (Request-Based) Rightsizing
• Azure SQL DB Rightsizing

S3 Rightsizing

AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) is a popular cloud object storage service used for common enterprise storage needs such as images, videos, website content, backups, and file sharing. AWS S3 Rightsizing offers insights and visibility into critical bucket-level attributes and metrics, providing optimization recommendations to move to cheaper, more relevant bucket types based on your usage characteristics. Recommendations are at the bucket level and consider bucket size & usage characteristics, allowing users to consume these recommendations and take desired actions based on the specific object's needs and potential impact.  

Complete with a new user interface, this feature delivers:

• Cost and savings summaries
• Relevant informative details for each bucket being used
• The ability to drill down into each recommendation to view usage metrics and see up to 3 alternative options
• The option to export recommendations outside of the platform as a CSV file

Cross-Architecture Recommendations

Tanzu CloudHealth offers cross-architecture recommendations for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) resources to include the consideration of switching to AWS Graviton processors. AWS Graviton is a family of processors designed to deliver the best price performance for cloud workloads running on AWS EC2 instances. AWS Graviton processors are compatible with existing operating systems available in EC2 Amazon Machine Images, such as Amazon Linux 2, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, Debian, and SUSE.

With this available option, Tanzu CloudHeath can now share cross-architecture recommendations and provide customers with the best fit AWS Graviton processor option within your set efficiency target. While there are some cases where switching to AWS Graviton may require architecture changes, the adoption of Graviton-based EC2 instance types has the potential to provide greater savings over more traditional instance types. 

In-Family Recommendations

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, allowing users to stay more informed when making rightsizing decisions and consider moving within the same family to realize rightsizing benefits without significantly reconfiguring resources.

Information on “In Family” recommendations can also be exported for consumption outside of the platform. Exports will include the following columns:

• In Family Recommendation
• In Family Recommendation Projected Actual Cost
• In Family Recommendation Projected List Price

Export Recommendations with Perspective Information 

Export functionality in Rightsizing now provides customers the ability to export information on the Perspective & Perspective group selected via the group by functionality and the Filter panel. Four columns are available on Perspective data when exporting, making this information available when reviewing Rightsizing recommendations outside of the platform:

• PerspectiveName1
• PerspectiveGroupName1
• PerspectiveName2
• PerspectiveGroupName2

Actual Cost vs List Price

Tanzu CloudHealh has recently added the option for customers to consider both “List Price” and “Actual Cost” when viewing rightsizing recommendations. Users can make their preferred selection using a simple drop-down option within Rightsizing, and see recommendations priced as follows:

• List price - View recommendations based on the listed, on-demand price for the AWS 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 Reserved Instances, Convertible RIs, and Savings Plans. Any discounts for current instances will be considered within the recommendation.

Selecting Actual Cost or List Price is currently generally available for AWS EC2 & EBS and Azure VM. For AWS S3, Actual Cost is the only available cost type. We plan to continue to release this functionality for additional services supported by our Rightsizing capabilities over the coming weeks, with AWS ElastiCache coming next in a few days.

GCP GKE Rightsizing

Tanzu CloudHealth has also enhanced our Kubernetes rightsizing recommendations, with GCP GKE (request-based) Rightsizing generally available.​​ This is an addition to the existing capabilities of Kubernetes Rightsizing on AWS & Azure, ensuring the feature is available on three major public clouds. Built on our new Rightsizing framework, GKE Rightsizing provides recommendations for changing container Requests based on usage of CPU and memory, including:

• Custom Efficiency Targets: Users can customize these recommendations by setting specific targets for CPU and Memory. Users can choose to use CPU/Memory Averages or Maxes and set a desired range from 1% to 120% for each metric.
• Filtering: Users can filter by cluster, namespace, or workload to drill down and look at a sub-set of resources.
• FlexOrgs Aware: Kubernetes Rightsizing Recommendations work with FlexOrgs, so users in sub-Organizational Units can only see and act on clusters for which they have permission. 
  
  

Azure SQL DB Rightsizing

Tanzu CloudHealth has also added Azure SQL DB as a supported service in our Rightsizing portfolio. Part of the Azure SQL family, Azure SQL DB is an always-up-to-date, fully managed relational database service built for the cloud.  

Our new Azure SQL DB Rightsizing feature generates recommendations to move to a cheaper database type based on your current usage characteristics. This feature supports both database transaction unit (DTU) and vCore purchase models. With an enhanced user interface, this feature delivers: 

• Recommendations for both DTU and vCore based databases
• Cost and savings summaries
• Customizable efficiency targets
• The ability to drill down into each recommendation to view usage and see up to 3 alternative options 

As Tanzu CloudHealth continues to partner with customer’s throughout their cloud journey, we will continue to invest in ensuring our customers have the solution they need to address the complete FinOps Framework. Learn more about Tanzu CloudHealth today by visiting our website, or take the next step on your cloud journey and get started with a free trial. In addition, Tanzu CloudHealth will also be onsite at FinOps X in San Diego from June 19-22. If you are there, please stop by our booth and say hello!