8APRIL 2021IN MY OPINIONTHE IMPORTANCE OF COST SCALABILITY AND WHAT TO WATCH OUT FORBy Josh 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
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