The document discusses the importance of regularly tuning cloud environments through deployment checkups. It highlights key areas to focus on during checkups, including cost optimization by identifying unused resources, ensuring optimal server utilization, implementing high availability and disaster recovery strategies, addressing security issues, and following best practices. Regular checkups help avoid inefficiencies that can arise over time and ensure deployments are optimized for cost, performance, availability and security.
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Tune Ups - Why They Make Sense
• Over time, deployments grow organically
• Some things are done quickly to solve an immediate issue and
are never readdressed
• “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”
• Squeaky wheels get the grease. But over-greased wheels tend
to get ignored – and can be costly
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Whys and Whats
• Deployment Checkups (the “why”)
• Cost
• Performance
• Best Practices
• Deployment Considerations (the “what”)
• Cost Optimization
• Server Utilization
• High Availability and Disaster Recovery (HA/DR) Implementation
• Security
• Best Practices
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Server Utilization
• Choose the right sized instance for the task at hand
• Utilize Reserved Instances (PlanForCloud can be of great
benefit here)
Something odd happened around this time…use alerts to
be notified and load testing to find the right instance size for the task
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Server Utilization
• Monitoring and Alerts
• Use them! Find small problems before they become big problems
• Look for trends and act on them (not on spikes or anomalies)
• Look for underutilization as well as overutilization
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HA/DR Considerations
• Avoid single points of failure (SPOF)
• Use Availability Zones (AZ) to your benefit
• Always place one of each component (load balancers, app servers,
databases) in at least two AZs
• Replicate data across AZs (HA) and backup or replicate across
regions/clouds for failover (DR)
• Setup monitoring, alerts and operations to identify and
automate problem resolution or failover process
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Best Practices
• Image Bundling - Friends don’t let friends bundle
• Use ServerTemplate with base RightImage
• Configure server at boot time
• Use EBS-backed images to speed boot times if needed
• Rare case where bundling is recommended
• Manual install of software required
• Boot time is unacceptably long to respond to dynamic event
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Best Practices
• Use autoscaling in combination with right-sized instances for
the task at hand
• Automate all operations – no manual changes
• Reboot – all is lost
• Automation is documentation
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Summary
• Deployment sprawl can lead to cost and operational
inefficiencies
• Cost Optimizations can be found hiding in many places
• Find the right size resource for the job
• Don’t use a hammer if it ain’t a nail
• High Availability should be designed in from the start
• Look for SPOF and find ways to eliminate them
• Disaster Recovery can be affordable
• Security – open up only what you have to
• Best Practices promote operational efficiencies