It’s part of the Solutions Review Premium Content Series, a collection of contributed columns written by industry experts in the maturing software categories. In this submission, JetStream Software President and Co-Founder Rich Petersen makes the case for why disaster recovery organizations should move as a cloud-based service today.
David McNerney, Senior Product Manager, Virtana
For businesses moving to hybrid / multi-cloud environments, rightsizing is one of the critical steps organizations can take to control costs and optimize resources. Cloud waste is a huge problem, and the common consensus is that idle and abandoned resources can account for up to one-third of wasted cloud costs. Rightsizing is about finding the best cloud configuration option to make sure you get the performance you need — within whatever given constraints you run under — at the lowest possible cost. This seems like a simple proposition, but tricky, because there are several factors that can make it a complicated process.
For one thing, business requirements are constantly changing, so workloads must be adapted to support them, which in turn changes with their operating parameters. And even if business requirements remain constant, the workloads themselves can evolve as usage changes. The other complex factor is that cloud service providers offer more configuration options than you can check. We are talking about hundreds of thousands. This is why many cost optimization tools in the cloud provide rightsizing recommendations.
The idea behind rightsization recommendations is to help organizations reduce the number of options to a manageable list of most relevant options that will help organizations save money while maintaining desired levels of performance. It’s really a must-have-but there’s one big problem that no one is talking about.
Just because boxes are checked that a feature exists does not mean it will deliver the benefits and value an organization needs; or that it takes into account the appropriate requirements to save money while running at the best level of performance. Often, the rightsization recommendations provided by optimization tools are not actually enforceable, making that feature unavailable.
There are several reasons why this happens, so let’s separate some of the challenges with rightsize recommendations.
The limitations go unnoticed
As an example, a mid-sized IT security company dedicated to preventing data loss runs an application on a particular — read: older — version of an OS. It hasn’t been updated in many years because doing so would require investment in a new OS and infrastructure to run it. Ang
the application runs smoothly, so there is no reason to fix what is not broken. For this company, recommendations requiring a newer OS version are useless. And without a way to tell their tool about their OS requirement for this particular opportunity, they will never get a recommendation that can be implemented.
Another company has an application that runs a memory-heavy database, so recommendations to cut memory at any level don’t start. It’s not that memory reduction is completely off the table, the company just needs to prove that the action won’t have a bad effect. This leads to the next issue.
Recommendations were made to the Blind Trust
Many tools say, here are our recommendations — trust us! Some will provide very basic categorization (easy/medium/hard, or baseline/aggressive) but you can’t tweak the underlying data science, which is a black box. How comfortable are you with making changes that affect mission -critical tasks for your organization based solely on trust?
Not looking at the Big Picture
In many organizations, you have to convey recommendations to another team for implementation and it is sometimes difficult to secure adoption. For example, the development team is not traditionally used to thinking about cost. If, focusing on functionality and security, they find out by testing the app that doubling the CPU size works, that’s what they’re going for. They are not likely to experiment with how to get to the lowest CPU limit that still allows the application to function as needed. They also probably don’t want to implement a change to save the company $ 100 per month. This is understandable — they don’t want to break anything. But if you can prove the application will not be negatively affected and it is in the best interest of the business, you are more likely to earn on those recommendations.
One Size Does Not Fit All
Different teams have different goals. For production applications that are stable and running in quantity, any opportunity to avoid inefficiencies can lead to significant savings. Development teams, on the other hand, benefit from the experiment. Organizations don’t want to stifle innovation for the sake of squeezing pennies. Also, different workloads have different requirements. If you apply the same set of parameters to your customer-facing applications as you do to your backup workloads, you could risk limiting performance where you can’t afford, or more likely, overspend when it is not necessary.
What is Needed in a Recommendation Engine
If you are familiar with any of these issues, it may be time to seek out a new source for rightsization recommendations. There are some basic requirements that organizations should be aware of including:
- Customization: Companies need the ability to set parameters based on specific business or technical needs for specific applications or workloads. If you have specific CPU, network, memory, or disk needs, you need to factor in those. If you have some specific constraints, such as the OS version, they need to be considered.
- What-if analysis: Getting a recommendation to save money is one thing; Understanding the impact beyond cost is something else altogether. It is important to see the impact of the change and adapt the recommendation accordingly.
- Multiple policy support: Organizations must be able to support the diverse needs of all constituents throughout the organization. The only way to do that is to apply different policies in different areas.
- Integration with change management: For some organizations, having recommendations integrated with change management, such as ServiceNow or Jira, may be a good-to-have rather than a must, but it makes the application process simpler. of recommendations. Embedding them in the operational workflow can improve the utilization of those changes.
Business leaders need solutions that will radically simplify the management of their hybrid cloud IT infrastructure. Rightsization recommendations are about finding the best cloud configuration option to make sure you get the performance you need at the lowest possible cost. After all, the only way to get value from recommendations is to actually implement them.
David McNerney is the Product Manager for Virtana Optimize. He brings combined 11 years of experience in the cloud cost management, software, and security sectors. Prior to Virtana, David served in Customer Success and Sales roles for DC area startups focused on software and security. David has a BA from the University of Virginia, where he studied English and History.