Given that spring is still very much in the air, my attention has turned to tidying up the yard and getting things in good shape for summer. While things are not so seasonally-focused in the world of cloud, the metaphor of taking time out to clean things up applies to unused cloud resources as well. We have even seen some call this ‘cloud pruning’ (not to be confused with the Japanese gardening method).
Cloud pruning is important for improving both cost and performance of your infrastructure. So, what are some of the ways you can go about cleaning up, optimizing, and ensuring that our cloud environments are in great shape?
Delete Old Snapshots
Let’s start with focusing on items that we no longer need. One of the most common types of unused cloud resources is old Snapshots. These are your old EBS volumes on AWS, your storage disks (blobs) on Azure, and persistent disks on GCP. If you have had some form of backup strategy then it’s likely that you will understand the need to manage the number of snapshots you keep for a particular volume, and the need to delete older, unneeded snapshots. Cleaning these up immediately helps save on your storage costs and there are a number of best practices documenting how to streamline this process as well as a number of free and paid-for tools to help support this process.
Delete Old Machine Images
A Machine Image provides the information required to launch an instance, which is a virtual server in the cloud. In AWS these are called AMIs, in Azure they’re called Managed Images, and in GCP Custom Images. When these images are no longer needed, it is possible to deregister them. However, depending on your configuration you are likely to continue to incur costs, as typically the snapshot that was created when the image was first created will continue to incur storage costs. Therefore, if you are finished with an AMI, be sure to ensure that you also delete its accompanying snapshot. Managing your old AMIs does require work, but there are a number of methods to streamline these processes made available both by the cloud providers as well as third-party vendors to manage this type of unused cloud resources.
Jay Chapel is the CEO and co-founder of ParkMyCloud. After spending several years in the cloud management space, Jay saw that there was no simple solution to the problem of wasted cloud spend – which led him to start ParkMyCloud in 2015. Before that, he spent 10+ years with Micromuse and IBM Tivoli, a provider of business infrastructure management software.
Optimize Containers
With the widespread adoption of containers in the last few years and much of the focus on their specific benefits, few have paid attention to ensuring these containers are optimized for performance and cost. One of the most effective ways to maximize the benefits of containers is to host multiple containerized application workloads within a single larger instance (typically large or x-large VM) rather than on a number of smaller, separate VMs. In particular, this is something you would could utilize in your dev and test environments rather than in production, where you may just have one machine available to deploy to. As containerization continues to evolve, services such as AWS’s Fargate are enabling much more control of the resources required to run your containers beyond what is available today using traditional VMs. In particular, the ability to specify the exact CPU and memory your code requires (and thus the amount you pay) scales exactly with how many containers you are running.
So alongside pruning your trees or sweeping your deck and taking care of your outside spaces this spring, remember to take a look around your cloud environment and look for opportunities to remove unused cloud resources to optimize not only for cost, but also performance.
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