The first step of your cloud transformation journey? Rightsizing.

Rightsizing isn’t a cloud-specific activity, but a cloud migration lends itself very well to rightsizing.

A cloud transformation can motivate a rightsizing process.

What’s the motivation?

One.

(The obvious one.)

Because cloud is pay-as-you-go, being rightsized is key for keeping your costs clear-cut.

Two.

(The uncomfortable surprise, that you want to avoid.)

If you move your IT to the cloud with its current configurations, without giving a thought to rightsizing, your costs in the cloud will likely skyrocket.

On the other hand, if your environment is rightsized before you move it to the cloud, you will only pay for what you need. From the very beginning.

Our partners, who facilitate digital transformations in large organizations, agree that there is a shiny opportunity for rightsizing when entering into a digital transformation.

At that time, you are already doing focused work on the nitty-gritty of your infrastructure, so the option to rightsize while you’re at it might seem obvious.

For some, it’s a no-brainer to include this activity, because they already have a practice of continuous rightsizing. But to be honest, we rarely see that.

Most organizations have a (scarily) laissez-faire approach to their capacity fit. If you are in an organization like most, you are overprovisioning immensely.

That means you’ll be paying for capacity that you don’t need.

In the cloud, those unnecessary costs can be severe.

Most who choose to include rightsizing as a preliminary activity of a digital transformation, experience a visible impact on the transformation that follows and how it lands. Proper preparation is the key to a successful transformation.

If you rightsize when you enter into a cloud transformation, you can ensure your capacity fit from the very beginning.

That being said, rightsizing is not a one-hit discipline.

Staying rightsized can be a continuous activity.

You might want to keep an eye on your capacity fit.

Perhaps introduce capacity management as a continuous part of finOps.

(Cloud finOps, if you’re into the lingo.)

Worried that this will be another reoccurring resource-heavy activity on your table?

Automate the process.

Choose a service that does ongoing automatic monitoring of your IT environment.

Intelligent services can help you stay updated on your capacity and resource utilization.

Ensure your capacity fit on an ongoing basis.

Then you can sleep tight knowing that your cloud costs won’t run wild.

We provide a (pretty clever) service that supports you in all of the above.

This solution provides actionable data for your rightsizing process and helps you ensure your capacity fit in the future.

Here are two approaches to rightsizing based on functionality/features we provide with Mugato:

This is a resource utilization bubble chart.

It visualizes the servers in your IT infrastructure based on resource utilization.

What you see here, is that a few databases do use a lot of resources.

It (obviously) makes sense to allocate a lot of resources to those.

But what we also see, is that the majority are tiny machines.

That’s the multitude of little light blue bubbles on the left (in the last part of the animation, that is.)

These are probably worth consolidating.

Simple as that.

This visualization (top graph) is an overview of CPU utilization.

This data visualization shows you where there is an opportunity to cut allocated CPU on a large scale, and where you should turn the knobs on individual servers.

A way for you to see the actual utilization on your servers, and what you can rightsize without losing on performance.

If you want to be precise, consider the percentile.

What has the peak been for 95% of server lifetime?

What has the peak been for 99% of server lifetime?

For instance, the servers represented by the top spikes can be sized roughly after the 99 percentile. But on the bottom of the same line, you see quite a lot of servers, that don’t even get a spike on that graph. They simply use very little of the allocated CPU.

When you look at that bottom line, it’s pretty remarkable how much you can rightsize.

Without losing performance.

A data visualization like this can help you find a better balance between performance and utilization, so you don’t overprovision.