with a storehouse of underperforming – or overperforming – units . They want to ensure they are getting a consistent , predictable , reliable service based on what they are paying .
How do you achieve mastery of the cloud ? In short , it involves taking several steps to assign resources for your cloud environment , to set performance measuring criteria and then to manage facets of the environment based on performance over time .
Find the Best Fit , the Best Cost Solution
You need to have insight into what you are buying and make sure of what you are getting to ensure you are provisioning the best units available . The only way to do that is to know what you need and then test every instance upon provisioning to confirm that it meets your minimum requirements . If it does not meet that threshold , the unit will be killed and a new one provisioned .
How do you set the requirements ? First , profile your workloads . Every workload has a resource consumption profile based on concurrent consumption of compute , network , memory and storage for IaaS , or database transactions in the case of DBaaS . To define the “ workload profile ,” collect the time series data over time and look for daily patterns where the maximum concurrent utilization is at its peak .
Once the workload profiles are captured and quantified , build out a synthetic workload that matches the native load , and place that on a number of instance types ( big , medium , small ). This helps you identify the best service available for your workload at the best total cost , to define the “‘ best fit , best cost ”’ solution .
Manage the Environment – Providing Service Assurance
Once you are running in the cloud , how do you validate that the service you were getting on day one is the same service or better on day two , and day 200 . In a DevOps framework , you will set up regular tests that will re-validate the cloud service against a baseline to ensure your cloud continues to run at optimal levels . When services are not running at an optimal level , through the DevOps continuous integration / continuous deployment ( CI / CD ) pipeline , you integrate by pruning and replacing cloud instances .
If , for instance , an acceptable performance for a given workload profile is 230,000 operations per second , you need to find the right IaaS platform for the job . If it does not fit the requirements , throw it away and get another one in a matter of minutes . The once-a-day , -week or -month , 10-minute test will ensure you are not buying more than you need , confirm you are getting all the performance your application requires and eliminate churn in your DevOps / CloudOps teams .
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