MARCH 2021CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM8THE IMPORTANCE OF COST SCALABILITY AND WHAT TO WATCH OUT FORJOSH SCHLANGER, SENIOR DIRECTOR OF DEVOPS AND PRODUCT SUPPORT, THE REAL REALI have spent my entire career on the operational side of IT, whether as an End User Support Engineer, Systems Administrator, IT manager/director, DevOps/Infrastructure, Site Reliability, etc. And during my time in these various roles, I have learned and started to talk about what I believe are the 3 SaaS Operations Pillars for Success--1) Scalability, 2) Reliability, & 3) Security. While each of these pillars deserves its own due, I would like to focus on Scalability, and specifically, how to become aware and properly manage Cost Scalability in a cloud-based world; what to consider, what to look for, and how best to manage.Public Cloud-All the Cool Kids are Doing It!At the beginning of my work journey, I had the opportunity to build out infrastructure in data centers (or at least in a colocation facility), leveraging capital expenditure budgets to purchase hardware and software as necessary. While this is obvious and many in the industry have discussed and/or written about this topic, it forced technical and business leaders to think about how they were best using the resources they had already purchased while requiring these same teams to plan and communicate the need for more during the annual budget cycles. This process "control valve" had value, but most argued it slowed down innovation.Then along comes Public Cloud, and while the advent of the public cloud wasn't explicitly meant to solve the capital expense process as I describe above, it did improve the ease of experimentation and innovation by allowing for quick access to the necessary infrastructure. This is great for speed to market and agility (quick iterations), but the "waste" it leaves in its wake is quite scary, and I have seen it first hand, even to the point where the CFO will come walking into your office (or walking up to your open cube desk) yelling "What the hell are we doing spending this amount in the cloud!!!!!?!?!!!"How to Make the CFO Love What You Do (or like you just a bit more)In the next few sections, I'm going to describe areas in Public Cloud people should consider in order to prevent a cost-tastrophe for their business. It will be focused on AWS, but the same concepts/tooling can be leveraged in Google Compute or Microsoft Azure.Flip the Compute Cost NarrativeAs many of you know, there are 3 models for compute costs; On-Demand, Reserved Instances (or Reserved VMs), and Spot Instances (aka Preemptible in GCP or Low Priority in Azure). Most organizations just start by using On-Demand, work their way to purchasing Reserved Instances/VMs for workloads that are consistent, and then leverage Spot instances as necessary. Instead, I would implore you to work the process in the opposite manner ... Start with Spot Instances where possible (especially if you are already running containers), purchaseReserved Instances / VMs where Spot doesn't work, and then, if necessary, use On-Demand. While leveraging Spot Instances in AWS can be difficult to manage (see my article here that talks about it), this should be the default for organizations. Also, as containers and Kubernetes continues to take over the infrastructure layer, implementing this has never been easier.You are probably asking--Why? Well, the simple answer is that Spot pricing is 80-90 percent of On-Demand, and 50-60 percent below Reserved Instances (RIs). Who doesn't wants to save that kind of money?! Plus, the sooner you do this, the quicker you can show a real cost advantage while pushing to put more workloads into the cloud. Now, if Spot doesn't work for you (for whatever reason), then you need to move to RI's, but this does require a commitment. If possible, I suggest checking out the Reserved Instance marketplace in AWS to get cheap RIs at discounts beyond the norm. (Unfortunately, this can be short-lived, i.e.,-only a couple of months) Again, you can save earlier than anticipated and put that money back into the business.Now that we have mastered compute, let's move to the network ...IN MY View
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