In our ongoing discussion on cloud waste, we recently talked about orphaned resources eating away at your cloud budget, but there’s another type of resource that’s costing you money needlessly and this one is hidden in plain sight – overprovisioned resources. When you looked at your initial budget and made your selection of cloud services, you probably had some idea of what resources you needed and in what sizes. Now that you’re well into your usage, have you taken the time to look at those metrics and analyze whether or not you’ve overprovisioned?
One of the easiest ways to waste money is by paying for more than you need and not realizing it. Here are 6 types of overprovisioned resources that contribute to cloud waste.
Unattached/Underutilized Volumes
As a rule of thumb, it’s a good idea to delete volumes that are not attached to instances or VMs. Take the example of AWS EBS volumes unattached to EC2 instances – if you’re not using them, then all they’re doing is needlessly accruing charges on your monthly bill. And even if your volume is attached to an instance, it’s billed separately, so you should also make a practice of deleting volumes you no longer need (after you backup the data, of course).
Underutilized database warehouses
Data warehouses like Amazon Redshift, Google Cloud Datastore, and Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse were designed as a simple and cost-effective way to analyze data using standard SQL and your existing Business Intelligence (BI) tools. But to get the most cost savings benefits, you’ll want to identify any clusters that appear to be underutilized and rightsize them to lower costs on your monthly bill.
To identify a cluster as “underutilized,” you can set criteria based on CPU percentage and ReadIOPs/WriteIOPs follow the criteria below for Amazon Redshift clusters and use with other providers accordingly.
Underutilized relational databases
Relational databases such as Amazon RDS, Azure SQL, and Google Cloud SQL offer the ability to directly run and manage a relational database without managing the infrastructure that the database is running on, or a having to worry about patching of the database software itself.
As a best practice, Amazon recommends that you check the configuration of your RDS for any idle DB instances. You should consider a DB instance idle if it has not had a connection for a prolonged period of time, and proceed by deleting the instance to avoid unnecessary charges. If you need to keep storage for data on the instance, there are other cost-effective alternatives to deleting altogether, like taking snapshots. But remember – manual snapshots are retained, taking up storage and costing you money until you delete them.
Underutilized Instances/VMs
We often preach about idle instances and how they waste money, but sizing your instances incorrectly is just as detrimental to your monthly bill. It’s easy to overspend on large instances or VMs that are you don’t need. With any cloud service, whether it’s AWS, Azure, or GCP, you should always “rightsize” your instances and VMs by picking the instance size that is optimized for the size of your workload – be it compute optimized, memory optimized, GPU optimized, or storage optimized.
Once your instance has been running for some time, you’ll have a better idea of whether not the chosen size is optimal. Review your usage and make cost estimates with AWS Management Console, Amazon CloudWatch, and AWS Trusted Advisor if you’re using AWS. Azure users can review their metrics from Azure Monitor data, and Google users can import GCP metrics data for GCP virtual machines. Use this information to find under-utilized resources that can be resized to better optimize costs
Inefficient Containerization
Application containerization allows multiple applications to be distributed across a single host operating system without requiring their own VM, which can lead to significant cost savings. It’s possible that developers will launch multiple containers and fail to terminate them when they are no longer required, wasting money. Due to the number of containers being launched compared to VMs, it will not take long for container-related cloud waste to match that of VM-related cloud waste.
The problem with controlling cloud spend using cloud management software is that many solutions fail to identify unused containers because the solutions are host-centric rather than role-centric.
Idle hosted caching tools (Redis)
Hosted caching tools like Amazon ElastiCache offer high performance, scalable, and cost-effective caching. ElastiCache also supports Redis, an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache and message broker. While caching tools are highly useful and can save money, it’s important to identify idle cluster nodes and delete them from your account to avoid accruing charges on your monthly bill. Be cognizant of average CPU utilization and get into the practice of deleting the node if your average utilization is under designated minimum criteria that you set.
How to Combat Overprovisioned Resources (and lower your cloud costs)
Now that you have a good idea of ways you could be overprovisioning your cloud resources and needlessly running up your cloud bill – what can you do about it? The end-all-be-all answer is “be vigilant.” The only way to be sure that your resources are cost-optimal is with constant monitoring of your resources and usage metrics. Luckily, optimization tools can help you identify and automate some of these best practices and do a lot of the work for you, saving time and money.