Cloud Optimization: A guide to the right tools and techniques

Cloud allows scaling, but your Cloud usage surely has a cost involved. This implies you cannot keep unnecessary data, non-production environments, extra services, or additional instances running in your Cloud forever. If you do so, the cost of Cloud will become too pocket-heavy – to the extent that it’ll obstruct your organization’s survival.

Before you start questioning if your digitization plan was ‘at all considered-worthy,’ let us introduce you to the concept of Cloud Optimization.

What is Cloud Optimization?

It is the process of balancing your data and processes in the Cloud as per your current infrastructural requirements. The process involves decluttering of the Cloud, AI/ML-enabled optimization, redundancy reduction, and updation of your Cloud for the highest productivity.

The aim of this overall procedure is to make your organization able to allocate optimal resources to the existing application and cut unnecessary costs.

The Need for Cloud Optimization

Your organization, at the time of adopting the Cloud or migrating to it, might have one or multiple applications. These apps have data, monolithic structures, test environments, policies, modules, and whatnot. With time, the amount of outdated data, configurations, and even applications in your Cloud (thanks to its scaling capacity) increases.

Now, if you keep all the useless or outdated data assets and instances in your Cloud, it will eat up the Cloud’s space and will affect the performance of other services/apps. Besides, it will increase your Cloud expenditure multifold. Cloud optimization is the solution that prevents it all. It is essential to optimize your Cloud more often. Benefits would be:

• Better performance for your application(s) – in terms of speed as well as SEO;
• Higher navigability and visibility within your Cloud infrastructure;
• Reduce the cost of operating in the Cloud.
• Simplified Cloud management; 

Implementing Cloud optimization for the highest efficiency

 Optimization of your giant Cloud cannot be completed in a day. It's a process to be carried out in several stages, and for various environments. Hiring an experienced cloud optimization services provider like Opsio, to perform the process, will make it smooth and flawless for you.  Let’s talk about the optimization stages without further ado.

Stage 1: Infrastructure

 You can make decisions related to expanding or shrinking your in-use resources while optimizing your Cloud at the infrastructure level. For example, check how your infrastructure is utilizing its horizontal and vertical scaling capacity.  For advanced optimization, load-balancers, autoscaling features of the Cloud provider, and application architecture can also be taken into consideration.  

Stage 2: Resources

 From operating systems to storage units, RAID, HDD, and file systems, everything has to be considered at this stage. It enables you to find idle and overloaded resources. Assessing your app's resource utilization will help you in figuring out the actual resource usage related to your app, thereby optimizing it.  

Stage 3: Server

Server misconfigurations can lead to high resource wastage and even cybersecurity threats. So, while optimizing your Cloud, do not skip optimizing your server configurations.  Check the set limits, keepalive connections, logs settings, buffer thresholds, and other similar settings to improve your server's performance. Utilizing socket sharding and thread pooling-like abilities can further help you optimize your configuration.  

Stage 4: Database

As the database plays a major role in keeping your application available for the end-users, its optimization cannot be neglected. You can consider optimizing database queries, code loops, SSH connections, certificated, user accounts, external links, and configurations at this stage.  

Stage 5: Application

 That’s the most important and least optimized part of an organization’s Cloud infrastructure as businesses often focus on improving their applications for their end-users rather than their Cloud. To optimize your Cloud at the application level, the typical components to focus on are:

 Cloud storage

• Instances and app features
• Customer or end-user data
• User interfaces
• Application modules
• Non-production environments
• APIs and caches   Once you will start the process, you will realize that the optimization process at this level is also useful for your app and target users. It can improve your app performance, speed, time-to-market, and responsiveness.  

5 Best Practices and tips to Consider during Cloud Optimization

 In the previous section, we enlisted the overall approach, best-suited for Cloud optimization. But before you begin, you must know what to keep in mind throughout the process.  GCP, MS Azure and AWS cost optimization best practices are as enlisted:  

1. Always hire platform-specific and certified experts to perform optimization (for example, AWS cost optimization should be performed by AWS experts only)
2. Get complete visibility inside your Cloud to understand what needs to be optimized.
3. Understand what is the purpose of optimization so that you do not tangle yourself in a never-ending process.
4. Set a scope of the process as per your needs and budget.
5. Utilize Cloud optimization tools and services useful for your organization and process.

Best Cloud Optimization Tools

When it comes to optimizing the Cloud, cost management tools are the most useful aid to gain visibility into your inactive or anomaly-specific processes. Let’s talk about a few of them next.

AWS Cost Explorer - ACE is a built-in AWS tool to quickly see your cost drivers, spending trends, and anomalies. Azure Cost Management - This Azure cost optimization tool is suited for your Azure-based configuration. It suggests actions to take and allows setting budget alerts.

Similarly, there are platform-specific tools like -

GCP Billing for the Google Cloud Platform CloudHealth for your VMware configuration Kubecost for the k8s deployment

If you want a tool that supports GCP, AWS, and Azure together, Flexera makes a good choice.

Xi Beam is useful for enterprises utilizing multi-cloud implementations.

However, there is nothing better than consulting Cloud optimization experts, finding the top optimization tools specific to your Cloud network, and performing a full-fledged Cloud optimization followed by recurring optimization that is automated to an extent.