Throughout the computing era, we’ve seen the pendulum swing between customized and standard solutions. Custom solutions, tailored to the precise needs of an application or user, can boost efficiency, productivity, and ease-of-use, but come at a premium price. Standard solutions provide economies of scale, greater compatibility, and lower prices, but the “one-size-fits-all” approach doesn’t always …

Standard or Custom Cloud Instances? How to Decide? Read More »

Imagine that you receive your monthly cell phone bill, and you are shocked to see how much you’re spending for your family-service plan. A quick check of the bill’s details reveals one especially high-cost element: Your children are streaming a lot of television shows. Realizing this fact, you might decide to set up a new …

Why Saving 30% on Your Cloud Deployments May Be a Bad Deal Read More »

One of the greatest strengths of cloud computing is that many of its benefits are easy to conceptualize and articulate. That’s certainly true for the benefit of cloud elasticity and agility. Your cloud-based application suddenly needs more or less computing power or storage? Simply tap some additional cloud resources – or release unneeded capacity – …

Auto-Scaling Cloud Applications: Practice is Harder Than Theory Read More »

As enterprises push more application workloads into public clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, high cost is emerging as a major pain point. Purchasing separate cloud instances for each workload takes the efficiencies created by workload stacking away from the end customer. Optimizing and right-sizing instances based on workload patterns …

How to use container stacking to drive cloud savings of 80% Read More »

Being a chief information officer or IT manager can be difficult, but it’s rarely boring. Given the accelerating pace of technological change, as soon as these professionals become comfortable with some cutting-edge technology, another compelling advance demands their attention. For many IT leaders, containers have become one of the top items on their “to-do” lists. …

Using Containers to Reduce Public Cloud Costs Read More »

Moving some or all of your computing operations to the cloud is seen by many as a good way to reduce many of the management and resource demands associated with IT operations. Still, while public cloud may remove the burden of hosting the infrastructure, the resulting changes required to operations, governance, and management structures can …

What Today’s Overburdened Cloud Architect Needs to Succeed Read More »

Companies face psychological, institutional, and technical hurdles when it comes to confidently right-sizing app instances In a recent post, we noted that many companies are struggling to control their public cloud costs, even though a key driver for moving to the public cloud in the first place was often to cut infrastructure expenses. There is …

Right-sizing Public Cloud Instances Can Cut Costs 20%-40% Read More »

The rush to the cloud is well underway. According to a 2016 IDG Enterprise Cloud Computing Survey of IT leaders, 45% of their IT environments was hosted in a private, public, or hybrid cloud environment. Cloud vendors are responding to the demand with a dizzying array of options which routinely lead to costly over-provisioning and …

Solving the Cloud Placement Puzzle Requires Science – Not Guesswork Read More »

By almost any measure, cloud computing is on a tear. Most organizations have grown comfortable with this form of computing, and many have grown passionate. Unfortunately, far too many companies are still using a haphazard, piecemeal approach in their adoption of different cloud models and services. The lack of a comprehensive cloud computing strategy today …

Is Your Cloud Approach the Right Approach? Read More »

In this final segment of our ongoing series about right-sizing public cloud instances for optimal performance and cost efficiency, we are focusing on a common source of cloud overspending: deadwood. Idle or zombie instances plague many public cloud environments, insidiously wasting your opex budget dollars. This deadwood can occur without you even realizing it, and …

How to Eliminate Deadwood in AWS, Azure, & Google Cloud Platform Without Risking Disaster Read More »