According to most cloud reports, cloud cost reduction is the leading priority for both enterprise and SMB cloud optimization teams. Majority of the respondents claim that reducing the costs associated with cloud services and infrastructure was a primary focus for the current year.
Gaining control of compute costs has become a priority in recent years, as more and more enterprises migrate their infrastructures to the cloud. Inefficient use of resources, over-provisioning, increased latency and the complexity of managing dynamic cloud operations have led to rapidly rising cloud budgets.
We often find ourselves in discussions with engineering teams who are adamant that their code is already fully optimized and running perfectly. While there is some truth to that, this is often an evaluation based on personal and organizational experience. Also it is difficult to measure effectiveness and improve it while there is a continuous growing backlog lingering on the engineering teams head. Question remains how to increase efficiency and throughput of servers without investing heavily into it. And this is where we see Intel’s Granulate playing a key role in unlocking greater potential and efficiency of the runtime without having to refactor the code.
One of the tools that provides this capability of looking into the code and also cutting cost is granulate.io by Intel. To get the most out of an application while also maximizing the cloud cost savings, requires some in depth analysis, based on the use case.
While Intel’s Granulate has many features, we will focus on their unique features of App-Level Optimization, Continuous Profiling and look at their Dashboard view.
App-Level Optimization equals better Cloud cost savings
The complexity of cloud cost reduction in dynamic cloud environments requires robust automation. Continuous optimization tools are essential for aligning compute resources with workload demands cost-effectively. For example, AWS reduces costs by deploying different strategies such as:
- Choosing the correct region for workloads
- Balancing reserved instances and spot instances
- Shutting down or turning off unused instances
- Rightsizing low-utilization instances
- Enabling lifecycle management policies to transfer infrequently accessed storage to lower-cost storage tiers
Intel Granulate empowers enterprises and digital native businesses with real-time, continuous application-level performance optimization and capacity management, on any type of workload, resulting in cloud and on-prem compute cost reduction. Available in the AWS, GCP, Microsoft Azure and Red Hat marketplaces, the AI-driven technology operates on the runtime level to optimize workloads and capacity management automatically and continuously without the need for code alterations.
Continuous Profiling allows for Cloud budget reduction
Continuous profiling analyzes code performance across your environment, allowing you to find opportunities for improving cost efficiency. This tool offers developers, performance engineers and DevOps a continuous and autonomous way to identify runtime inefficiencies.
Source: Intel Continuous Profiler
Profilers like Intel’s Continuous Profiler feature easy-to-navigate flame graphs that pinpoint performance regressions, such as garbage collection, deadlocks and others to help smooth deployments. That helps to elevate your cloud resource and rate optimization efforts.
The Intel Granulate Dashboard
Intel Granulate’s dashboard provides real-time visibility and control by visually tracking, analyzing, and displaying key cost and performance measures. The dashboard provides quick access to summary data over all optimized clusters and individual data for each service to validate your investment.
- Cost and carbon savings. A centralized dashboard lets you see how much compute spending you’re saving, comparing actual spend across optimized services against what would have been spent without optimization. You can also view performance improvements and CO2 reductions.
- Optimization deployment. The dashboard also monitors deployment status across services, showing distribution of those in active mode that are currently optimizing performance and those still in learning mode.
- Resource mapping. A graphical view of your compute environments shows you the health of each resource, creating an overview of your cloud infrastructure with drill-down capabilities into services.
Obviously there are other runtime optimization and cloud cost streamlining tool kits out there, but based on our customers’ feedback Intel’s Granulate has a unique combination of proprietary software and an enterprise first approach to deliver maximum savings while maintaining reliability, security, compliance and scalability.
As there are hundreds of tools out there claiming to be the best at everything, Hykell’s focus is to find the best of breed and working tools (not “promise-ware”) fit for each unique cloud journey.
About the author:
Ott Salmar is the Co-Founder at Hykell, a certified FinOps consultancy powerhouse, where he specializes in helping companies optimize their cloud bills, making them leaner and less overwhelming.