Migrating your dev to the cloud without thinking about cloud optimization is a little akin to eating a PB&J sandwich…except without the J.
Peanut butter is lovely on its own. But you’re missing the ingredient that brings it all together.
Cloud optimization is crucial if you want to ensure you’re getting the most out of your cloud spend and eliminating any inefficiencies that could slow you down.
Without it, you could find yourself spending a lot of your budget on cloud services you don’t need.
What is cloud optimization?
Cloud optimization refers to the process of finding and running your cloud environments and infrastructure as efficiently as you can at the lowest possible cost.
It’s become so important over the last few years because many companies simply pay for however much cloud capacity they think they need without worrying about value, usage, and costs.
It’s all about maximizing the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the cloud. This involves adjusting a range of factors that impact cloud performance like, for example, storage capacity and network bandwidth.
The goal of cloud optimization is to ensure cloud resources are being used in the best way, minimizing costs, improving performance, and delivering an outstanding user experience.
Why is cloud optimization important?
Because even though cloud is awesome, it’s also not exactly cheap these days. Everything from migration to maintenance to computing have to be perfectly optimized, or they can end up having a significant impact on your performance, products, and releases.
Cloud optimization can help improve app performance by ensuring resources are available when needed and that they’re being used in the best way — resulting in faster response times.
It helps devs scale resources up or down as needed, helping you ensure your applications can respond to changing demands and peaks in activity quickly.
As well as this, it’s ideal for boosting security by guaranteeing that cloud resources are configured properly, with vulnerabilities in security identified and addressed promptly.
The benefits of cloud optimization
Overall, cloud optimization can help devs make the most of their cloud environments. It’s all about ensuring that cloud resources are being used effectively, leading to faster build times, improved performance, and significant cost savings.
Faster build times
An optimized cloud environment means that developers can access the resources they need more easily, and it means that teams can allocate cloud compute power where it’s needed at the right time.
Because cloud optimization allows for scalability, resources can be spun up quickly to meet the demands of an application.
So, during times of high traffic and peaks in activity, additional resources are acquired, and users will be none the wiser.
Cloud optimizers like distributed computing, cloud integration, and build monitoring are all services that will contribute to fast build times. All things that Incredibuild is ideally placed to help with.
Cut costs
One big issue with cloud infrastructure that’s built ad hoc or without planning is that it lets costs pile up quickly and unexpectedly.
Devs who don’t buy enough cloud space for their projects can buy more when they need it, but this can become costly.
But the other side of the coin is that organizations often aren’t 100% sure how much cloud storage they’ll need, so they buy way too much to begin with.
This cloud infrastructure ends up going to waste, and devs are spending money on resources that they could be kicking to the curb.
By optimizing their cloud environments, organizations can achieve significant cost reductions without sacrificing compute capacity.
Spot orchestration
As we’ve discussed above, another big benefit of cloud optimization is that it allows for planning ahead.
This includes things like spot orchestration, which is much easier to manage when cloud environments are optimized for spot instances.
Cloud optimization helps automatically identify and procure spot instances for applications when they need them most. It also helps manage the lifecycle of spot instances, terminating and replacing them as needed to boost application performance.
Instead of scrambling to find spot instances when one goes offline, IT teams can have backups and fallbacks already in place based on their usage.
Cloud optimization and cloud cost management
It’s important to keep in mind that while cloud optimization and cloud cost optimization go hand in hand, they’re not the same thing.
Cloud optimization is focused on performance and efficiency, while cloud cost management is focused on keeping cloud spend down. Nevertheless, one is impossible without the other.
Cloud cost optimization tools are critical for making sure you’re keeping on top of your cloud spend.
This is where tools like spot orchestration come into play. Finding better ways to reduce the number of live instances being run can help devs and organizations cut costs.
Tools that support better instance management (also known as spinning up and down) mean fewer ghost instances that can add up to an unexpectedly large cloud bill.
Plus, monitoring the lifecycle of your instances closely ensures that your instances are being used as effectively as possible. Again, resulting in lower spend. Et voilà!
Ways to optimize cloud use
There are several ways to keep on top of your cloud use and make sure you’re optimizing it for the best overall user experience:
- Use cloud-native services: By using cloud-native services that are specifically designed to be used within the cloud, you can be sure that you’re using services that are optimized for enhanced performance and top-tier delivery.
- Optimize storage: Thinking about compression, deduplication, and other storage optimization techniques can help you reduce your need for masses of storage, making sure you’re only paying for what you really need.
- Monitor your resources: Monitoring things like memory, storage, and network usage can help you to identify areas of intense usage – and areas where you’re not using much memory at all – allowing you to scale your cloud capacity up or down accordingly.
- Use autoscaling: Autoscaling automatically adjusts the number of resources being used — scaling up during peaks of activity and down during dips in demand.
By putting these strategies into play, you can easily optimize your use of the cloud — helping you to truly get the most out of your dev environments with almost no effort.
While cloud is one of the biggest and most useful advancements in DevOps, using it in the right ways and ensuring your usage is totally optimized is crucial. The last thing you want is to be wasting valuable time, money, and resources if you don’t need to.
