Navigating the Cloud – Beyond “Best Practices”

Originally published by Cloud Computing Consultants.

Cloud migrations are complex. Rapidly evolving technology, team culture changes, and changing architectural requirements leave companies seeking options to alleviate their cloud migration paths. As a result, businesses are bombarded with a slew of “best practices” and “reference architectures” purported to guide them toward the most efficient, secure, and cost-effective cloud solutions. While these guidelines are invaluable for navigating the complexities of cloud migration and management, they often serve a dual purpose. At Cloud Computing Consultants, we have observed a recurring pattern: best practices aren’t just solution aids but they are also strategies for cloud providers to maximize profits. Below we explore ways that we help deal with these challenges.

Right-sized Architecture

Cloud vendors often inundate users with many architecture best practices documentation, promoting their products and services. For many businesses, especially those without vast cloud expertise, it can be challenging to sift through this information and identify what is truly necessary for their specific needs. This situation can lead to over-provisioned and under-utilized resources, significantly inflating costs without delivering proportional benefits.

Right-sized architecture is not about merely following vendor-provided blueprints but understanding and tailoring those recommendations to fit the unique demands and scale of your operations. Here are some high-level steps to help achieve the right-sized architecture:

1. Rather than reaching for reference architectures, begin with a thorough assessment of your application’s requirements, considering factors like expected traffic volumes, data storage needs, and compute power. Seek to understand the services that will incur the most cost to your applications. Careful tuning of these services can make or break your infrastructure budget.
2. Opt for a modular design. Using containerized applications provides more flexibility in the hosting environment. This allows you to effectively move between services, without locking into a specific type of deployment artifact. Be careful jumping into serverless services as these often create unnecessary complexity, and have their application architecture requirements that may not translate easily to other services.
3. Focus on continuous optimization. After deploying applications into the cloud, gather and evaluate the performance metrics to understand the real usage. This enables you to adjust the architecture to fit the needs of the application. While many application hosting services enable a scalable model, other environment setups such as network services (VPC, NAT Gateways, Load Balancers, etc) are static and may need more attention.

Embracing True Cloud Scalability & Managed Services

Hand-in-hand with the right-sized architecture is the usage of services that meet the true scale to zero capability. Traditional cloud services and container orchestrations often fall short in scaling down to zero, leading to ongoing costs even when the services are not in use. Often peripheral services such as load balancers also incur costs not calculated in the initial deployment but are necessary to run an application.

Enter solutions like AWS App Runner and Google Cloud Run. These services are designed to enable true scale-to-zero capabilities for containerized applications. By rearchitecting your applications to leverage these platforms, you can ensure that you’re only paying for the resources you use when you use them. This approach not only aligns more closely with the pay-as-you-go model of cloud computing but also encourages a more sustainable architectural design that can adapt to fluctuating demands without constant manual intervention. Additionally, these offload the management and orchestration of applications to the cloud provider, reducing the overall OpEx compared to services like Amazon EKS.

Consolidating Service Usage

Cloud enables opportunities never seen before, but with so many options at our disposal, it is easy to forget about the cost of these services. As a result, we recommend implementing a process to review when new services are added to the technology stack. Too often companies fall into service sprawl across their cloud vendors. This easily results in the implementation of multiple, overlapping services that could have been consolidated into fewer, more cost-effective solutions. This not only simplifies the architecture but also significantly reduces costs.

For instance, rather than deploying separate services for caching, messaging, and database management, consider utilizing a single managed service that can handle multiple functions. This not only streamlines operations but also leverages the cloud provider’s expertise in managing these services efficiently, allowing your team to focus on innovation and core business functions.

Regular Architecture Reviews and Cost Optimization

Continuous improvement is key to maintaining an efficient and cost-effective cloud architecture. Regularly scheduled architecture reviews and cost optimization exercises can help identify areas where costs can be reduced without impacting performance. Tools and services offered by cloud providers for monitoring, cost analysis, and resource optimization can be invaluable in these efforts. Engaging with a cloud consulting firm like CCC can provide an external perspective, offering insights and strategies that internal teams might overlook.

Conclusion

In the journey through cloud migration and optimization, it’s clear that a one-size-fits-all approach does not suffice. The key to success lies in crafting a cloud strategy that is as unique as your business. By critically assessing “best practices,” right-sizing your architecture, embracing true scalability, consolidating service usage, and continuously reviewing your architecture, you can navigate the complexities of the cloud while keeping costs in check.