Description: Downgrade the resources that are not sufficiently used


Right-sizing is the process of matching instance types and sizes to your workload performance and capacity requirements at the lowest possible cost. It’s also the process of looking at deployed instances and identifying opportunities to eliminate or downsize without compromising capacity or other requirements, which results in lower costs.


Audit: 

iCompaas has a scan engine that is running to gather data of the cost usage and is able to generate recommendations to help optimize your cloud costs.

 

Remediation:

Launch AWS Cost Explorer and check the recommendations page to see whether resources should be downgraded based on if the maximum CPU utilization is above 1% and cost savings are available in modifying the instance type. We have identified these resources as needing right-sizing. This means you can downgrade to a lower instance family and save money.


Identifying Opportunities to Right Size for the following resources:

  • EC2 instance types
  • AWS storage classes
  • RDS instance types


Impact: 

The resources downsized both save on the direct costs involved in cloud computing and also aid in coming up with a better savings plan to manage resources more efficiently.


Even if you right-size workloads initially, performance and capacity requirements can change over time, which can result in underused or idle resources. Additionally, new projects and workloads require additional cloud resources, and overprovisioning is the likely outcome if there is no process in place to support right-sizing and other cost-optimization efforts.


You should right-size your workloads at least once a month to control costs. You can make right-sizing a smooth process by:

  • Having each team set up a right-sizing schedule and then report the savings to management.
  • Monitoring costs closely
  • Enforcing tagging for all instances so that you can quickly identify attributes such as the instance owner, application, and environment (development, testing, or production).
  • Understanding how to right size


Right Size Using Performance Data

Right Size Based on Usage Needs

Right Size by Turning Off Idle Instances

Right Size by Selecting the Right Instance Family

Right Size Your Database Instance


References: 

  1. https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-management/aws-cost-optimization/right-sizing
  2. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/cost-optimization-right-sizing/cost-optimization-right-sizing.html