Cloud infrastructure scaling can assist in rightsizing cloud resources in various ways. When discussions occur regarding scaling, its context can often refer to adding resources. However, it can also refer to removing resources.
Preparing for how your cloud infrastructure scales begins with thought-out planning, design, and management of resource and tool allocations.
This can save your organization time and costs that could otherwise negatively affect your employees, customers, and company. In this article, we assist by highlighting impacts, identifying opportunities, implementation, and solutions that can help.
How Infrastructure Scaling Affects Time And Costs
Like all things we do in the cloud, infrastructure scaling has impacts on time and costs. The investment of these resources can often hinder plans to prepare infrastructure scaling, or not prioritizing it. Which can prevent well-designed architecture that is built with modern technologies and standardized processes.
However, time and money are two things that should advocate for scaling, not hinder it.
As your service or product continues to grow, so do your computing resources. Issues can arise when you allow time to pass without implementing or giving thought to scaling preparations. These same issues will make your infrastructure and its maintainability seem impossible, reactive approaches are normal, cause needless overspending, enable bad practices, and consistently waste time.
When thinking of these results, think of how or what can prevent them; relate those to how this affects all aspects of your organization — its resources, operations, developer hours, and ways it can save time and money for them.
How To Identify Scaling Opportunities
Identifying scaling opportunities is an ongoing practice and there are various ways to do it.
Scaling can relate to component and resource rightsizing, optimizing infrastructure processes, standardized practices, and operational improvements. Identifying these opportunities is a great start to improving your reactive or proactive situations.
Manual repeatable processes and operational pain can be great indicators that scaling your infrastructure is needed, to keep it in a maintainable state.
If you and your team are consistently responding to the same issues within your operation it can be a clear indicator that you will soon be on your way to a reactive operation, if you’re not already at that point.
When you have repeatable processes that are manually executed you can look into ways to lessen manual intervention. This will in turn reduce operational pain and tedious tasks.
Ask yourself this: How many times have you or your team responded to an issue only to implement a short-term solution until it arises again?
Often metrics, monitors, and alarms can assist in identifying issues within your service; and can assist in identifying scaling opportunities.
For instance, peak traffic times for your service could indicate a need to increase host or load balancer capacity; low traffic can indicate underutilized components. It can also identify areas to improve resources — such as memory, routing mechanisms, security protocols, storage, or optimizing code running on your resources.
Reviewing your compute resource data and metrics can not only help show you what needs to scale but can also alert you when to scale or implement improvements.
CloudZero is another great platform to help your engineering teams identify areas for improving and scaling your cloud infrastructure. With the functionality to analyze your spending on cloud services and resources on their platform, you can get a granular outlook on your spending metrics to gain insight.
Those insights can indicate ways to save on costs including the need to scale or optimize a particular service or component; optimize it to scale or improve code that was recently deployed; or maybe catch a spike in traffic due to a bad actor or bots running on your network.
Implement Infrastructure Scaling
When you have identified opportunities to scale your infrastructure, sometimes it can be challenging to know where to start or how to implement scaling.
Automation is a simple way to do so. Utilizing code, command-line interfaces, and APIs you can create automated processes for your team’s most manual and repeatable tasks.
Using these with your existing tools — such as alarms and pipelines — you can build fully automatic processes to execute without service disruptions for your customers.
Containerization, virtualization, orchestration, elastic services, and auto-scaling are out-of-the-box technologies that can help implement infrastructure scaling.
Tools like Docker, Vagrant, and Kubernetes assist in building, deploying, and orchestrating your service and applications automatically. They execute seamless integrations with consistent configurations. Elastic services and auto-scaling automatically scale your resources on an as-needed basis to handle component rightsizing, traffic, utilization, and overall operations.
DevOps methodologies and CI/CD processes are critical in promoting best practices and standardized procedures, thought-out designs, and reliable implementations for your cloud infrastructure.
They not only allow for integrations to deploy automatically and seamlessly, but they promote improvements and catch issues when you’re not looking. They can alert you when manual intervention is necessary with the ability to automatically review, approve, test, and deploy.
Custom images can be a great way to create and update your hosts consistently across your infrastructure.
Having configurations built via Infrastructure as Code (IaC) or via a front-end console gives you the ability to create images for your hosts and applications with little effort. The worry of applying the correct configurations is long gone.
Needless to say, deploying updates or upgrades is more efficient. It’s more effective and takes less time than manual implementation with less room for error.
Conclusion
Cloud infrastructure scaling is important to keep in mind during your day-to-day operations and planning. Working on ways to build it as a practice rather than perceiving it as a resource tank will help you and your team tremendously, in the short-term and long-term.
Even if your operation doesn’t necessarily seem like it needs it now, ensure it is a topic you are consistently re-visiting to review its status. This way it is always top-of-mind in anything you and your team decide to do.
When designed and implemented correctly it can save costs and time that can be utilized for other priorities, issues, edge cases, or future developments.
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