Using the public cloud has three benefits: cost savings, increased agility, and cloud flexibility. However, most users of the public cloud aren’t (yet!) succeeding in all three of them. You may be aware that your costs are out of control, but you might not have thought about how closely this is related to the incorrect usage of the term « elasticity ».
Cloud Elasticity: What It Really Means
The terms EC2 and EBS are named with the word « elastic » for a purpose. Users have the ability to rapidly scale up services to meet demand by provisioning what they need when they need it. Due to this capacity, experimentation and invention have been made possible as well as an explosion in agility.
The ability to dynamically reduce resources or turn them off in order to satisfy demand, however, is another component of elasticity and is not as straightforward to do. It is frequently ignored, and due to the cloud’s intended use, the issue with being just « half » elastic is critical.
You break the cloud’s promise to let you only pay for what you use when you allow resources to go in only up in the name of “elasticity”. Cost increases will come down hard on you. And sure, this is something that has happened repeatedly. Businesses discover that such readily available resources persist, filling their environments with garbage.
Knowledge is Power, but Not Always Action
The top objective for cloud users this year, according to a new Turbonomic poll, is to maximize the performance and affordability of their current cloud resources. It’s clear that cloud customers are aware that this is a problem they need to address given that this ranking at #1.
You are already aware of this. The bill may have caught your eye. The cost of your cloud services may be broken down by dashboards. But far too frequently, such dashboards are just tools for sharing nice data—or terrible data, depending on the situation—in team meetings.
Clearly, we understand. All of us are busy. It might be challenging to include attaining the promise of cloud elasticity in our always fluctuating list of workplace objectives. Making « reducing costs » one of them is undoubtedly difficult.
However, information is power, much as the insight you get from cost dashboards.
We have found that the majority of individuals don’t use that power.
When Elasticity Is Bidirectional, You Can Optimize
What would it look like to put that knowledge into practice?
You would actually only use the resources you require at the time you use them. By utilizing the usage-based pricing structure of public clouds, you would create a cost-effective environment.
And in a perfect world, this would be automated, allowing you to focus on the more exciting advantages of cloud infrastructure—growth and innovation—while the activity just happens on its own. Your money becomes available to pursue the business objectives that actually matter when you remove unnecessary spending from your cloud infrastructure.
