Optimization
Optimize your cloud environment to maximize performance, minimize costs, and drive business value.
After you define a solid baseline for your cloud environment, create a recurrent process for optimization. Practices such as cost optimization, rightsizing or rearchitecting obsolete environments, and deleting unused resources help your organization maximize return on investment.
A strong optimization strategy requires that you understand the workloads in your environment, make decisions based on data, and anticipate growth.
Areas for Optimization
Best Practices for Cloud-First Optimization
Architect cloud-first workflows that can adjust to elastic demand with limited human intervention.
Compared with on-premises environments, cloud environments can adapt to increased user demand with reduced human involvement. Design your solutions for the cloud so that your workloads have the following characteristics:
- Use services that best meet your organization's architectural and business requirements.
- Take advantage of new cloud services when appropriate.
- Are cost-effective by using platform features that provide visibility into cost and spending, such as budgets and cost-tracking tags.
- Apply flexible design patterns that can scale gracefully when demand grows or business requirements evolve.
- Collect and use metrics that drive scalability, promote optimization, and inform data-driven decisions.
Use the following best practices when designing your workload architecture to build cloud applications that optimize for cost and performance:
- Evaluate cloud services in the context of your requirements. Understand which cloud services best support the architecture and current business requirements.
- Be data driven. Data should inform decisions and provide detailed insight into your workload performance.
- Anticipate growth. Over time, your workloads might grow or expand into more geographical regions. Ensure that your architecture and the services that you use support your business growth.
- Optimize spending. The cloud allows for rapid provisioning of services. When your demand increases, it's important to have visibility into the associated costs and how to manage them.
- Architect for reliability and resiliency. Understand cloud services and design your applications with high reliability and resiliency. A robust cloud resiliency architecture must handle different types of adversities and correlated failures, such as hardware failure, data center disasters, network outages, software bugs, cyberattack, or operational errors.