Every day there is steady growth in cloud migrations by organizations. Data capacity of the cloud is not the only consideration for cloud migration but also the compute and processing capacity. Lack of cloud capacity planning leads to over-provisioning of the resources, ultimately leading to cloud wasting and overspending. The challenge here is calculating the capacity requirements of your infrastructure, while still benefiting from the cloud. Capacity planning in the cloud is an essential task for optimal usage of cloud resources and decreasing the cloud cost.
With the right cloud capacity planning, organizations become flexible in adopting new architectures and development to deploy applications in the cloud. Else you lose the advantages of flexible provisioning and end up paying the premium cost. The right cloud capacity planning depends on the application that is currently hosted on the server. While the application load and the load distribution keeps varying, the cloud instance must keep up and handle the traffic without causing downtime. To handle the sudden spike in traffic, cloud solution architects are left with two scaling options, vertical scaling, and horizontal scaling. Both have its advantages and disadvantages.
While vertical scaling causes the instance to be rebooted, servers will experience a small downtime leaving the users unsatisfied. The horizontal scaling ensures high availability and zero downtime. But, scaling doesn’t always promise to deliver the right size of capacity in the cloud. For example, your application needs 4 GB of ram and you have an instance that gives 2 core with 4 GB ram and other that gives 4 core with 8 GB of ram. To give 5 GB availability of ram to your application, you would have to host it on the latter instance even if the application is not utilizing the single core. This leads to the cloud wastage of resource and extra cost. Choosing a right cloud provider with required capacity instance also plays an important role in maintaining the right size of the cloud instance.
Cloud Capacity Planning can be achieved by following the below steps :
1. Use Cloud Billing Tool
Keeping in mind that the instance should neither by over-provisioned nor be under-provisioned. Cloud billing tools help to decide the right type of instance required for your computing needs. The right instance type should be chosen such that it optimally utilizes the resources and still saves cost. A good cloud billing tool will help in choosing the right instance type both in terms of size and cost.
2. Use Short-Term Instances
While provisioning an instance for longer duration satisfies the computing requirement, it leads to wastage of resources. Always use the short term instance for your short-term project. Cloud Providers auctions the unused instance in the market and one has to bid on it to acquire it. Such instance should be used for short time projects because the instance will be terminated once the bid price of it increases.
For example, Amazon Web Services gives you an option of spot instances. The spot instances can be launched at price less than the on-demand instance. This allows users to access resources for a shorter time-frame at a discounted price.
3. Never Guess about the Cloud Spending
One thing to note is to never guess about cloud spending. Cloud providers always mention the cost of each service in detail by providing examples. Evaluation of each workload should be done before meeting the requirements of CPU, network, storage, bandwidth, and memory requirements. The instance of suitable size, capacity, storage, network, etc must be chosen with appropriate testing and optimization. Perform cost assessment to maintain the right cloud capacity to cut down further cloud expenses.
4. Ensuring Cloud Resiliency while Migrating Applications
Before migrating to any cloud make sure your applications hosted in on-premises support the cloud’s resiliency and high availability. This step is crucial to avoid additional cost in the redesign of applications and maintaining the right cloud capacity.
5. Right Workload Size Ensures Right Cloud Capacity
The cloud capacity planning strategies must be followed to ensure the right workload size for your application. Before setting up the cloud environment, one must gather appropriate data. The CPU usage, memory metrics, storage needs, and server configurations must also be documented.
Although you take several precautions to get your infrastructure size right, it is possible that your cloud infrastructure is still not correctly sized. But this can be solved by recording the usage parameters of all instances. Cloud Analytic tools provided by Interpole can provide such data in simple dashboard which is easy to read, helps you spot the issues, and make decisions easily.
About InterPole
InterPole was established in 1996 and has been engaged in web hosting, email, and management of IT infrastructure. InterPole pioneered with Virtual Private Servers in 2004 and Cloud Hosting in 2008. Over the years, InterPole has worked with over 6200 mid-sized businesses and startups, and have assisted them in their journey towards the adoption of modern technologies through the Internet. InterPole is a Standard Consulting Partner of Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. With this partnership, provides Managed AWS service and maintains a team of engineers who are trained and certified for the specific cloud platforms. These benefits companies in defining their cloud strategy and making a well-planned journey, reliably and cost-effectively.