Rightsizing Your AWS Estate - Part 1
Are you tired of overspending on your AWS estate? Are you struggling to optimize your resources and reduce costs? Look no further, because in this blog post, we will be discussing the concept of rightsizing your AWS estate.
Rightsizing is the process of ensuring that your AWS resources are the right size for your workloads. It involves identifying underutilized and overutilized resources and adjusting them to meet the specific needs of your applications. By rightsizing your AWS estate, you can reduce costs, improve performance, and optimize your resources.
In this two-part blog post, we will be diving into the different methods and tools available for rightsizing your AWS estate, including AWS Trusted Advisor, AWS Cost Explorer, and other third-party tools. We will also be providing tips and best practices for rightsizing your AWS estate and maximizing your savings.
By the end of this two-part blog post, you will have a better understanding of how to rightsize your AWS estate and how to reduce costs while improving performance. So, whether you're new to AWS or a seasoned user, this post will provide valuable insights and actionable steps to help you optimize your resources and achieve the best results from your AWS estate.
Overprovisioned Resources & Rightsizing
Overprovisioning is the practice of allocating more resources than are necessary for a given task. In cloud computing (where a pay-as-you-go model is being used), overprovisioned resources accommodate unnecessary costs, usually termed as “cloud waste”.
For example, An EC2 instance is considered overprovisioned when at least one specification of your instance, such as CPU, memory, or network is being underutilized and can be rightsized while still meeting the performance requirements of your workload.
Rightsizing is therefore one of the most popular and effective ways to stop over provisioning of resources. It involves continually analysing instance performance and usage needs and patterns—and then making the right adjustments. Because your resource needs are always changing, rightsizing must become an ongoing process to continually achieve cost optimization.
What Can I RightSize?
Basically, you can rightsize three of the four core services of cloud computing you make use of; which are compute, storage, and database. However, in this blog, our focus will be on the compute service, which is the EC2 Instance service in AWS.
Before we get into how to rightsize and what AWS and third-party tools we can leverage on for effective rightsizing, let’s look at some of the best practices for rightsizing.
RightSizing Best Practices
- Start Simple: Idle resources, non-critical development/QA, and previous generation instances will require less testing hours and provide quick wins (The Amazon EC2 Launch time statistics can be used to identify instances that have been running longer than others and is a good statistic to sort your Amazon EC2 instances by).
- Rightsize before migration: If you skip rightsizing to save time, your migration speed might increase, but you will end up with higher cloud infrastructure spend for a potentially longer period of time. Instead, leverage the test and QA cycles during a migration exercise to test several instance types and families. Also, take that opportunity to test different sizes and burstable instances like the “t” family .
- The best rightsizing starts on the first day of deployment: As you perform rightsizing analysis, and ultimately rightsize resources, ensure any learnings are being shared across your organisation and influencing the design of new workloads and upcoming migrations.
- Measure twice, cut once: test, then test some more: The last thing you want is for a new resource type to be incapable of handling load or functioning incorrectly
- Test once and perform multiple rightsizing: Aggregate instances per autoscaling group and tags to scale rightsizing activities.
- Combine Reserved Instance or Savings Plans strategies with rightsizing to maximise savings: For Standard RIs and EC2 Instance SP: Perform your pricing model purchases after rightsizing and for Convertible RIs, exchange them after rightsizing. Compute Savings Plans will automatically adjust the commitment for the new environment.
- Ignore burstable instance families (T types): These families are designed to typically run at low CPU percentages for significant periods of time and shouldn’t be part of the instance types being analysed for rightsizing.
Before Rightsizing
It’s also important to take these steps into consideration before you begin your rightsizing process, or setting up a rightsizing policy for your cloud team.
- Determine rightsizing ownership model i.e who should be responsible for and executing it and also, who is responsible for measuring the outcome.
- Which data do you need to identify resources?
- Prepare and execute rightsizing suggestions i.e how will you execute rightsizing? What SaaS tool will you use?
Wendu SME & Startup Package
In the second part of this two-part blog post, we’ll talk dive into EC2 Instance rightsizing, how to rightsize, what AWS services you can leverage to achieve your rightsizing goals, and what other third -party tools you can take advantage of.
At Wendu, we understand how cost intensive achieving cloud security is for SMEs and Startups, albeit, how important it is to do so. Because of this, we’ve created a special SME and Startup package where we can become long-term cloud security partners that fit into your SME and Startup budgets.
To learn more about Wendu’s SME and Startup package, you can contact us here, with the message ‘Wendu SME and Startup Package’; or if you’d like to learn more about Wendu through a demo, you can request for one here, and we’ll definitely reach out to you in less than 12 hours of your request.