What are Right-Sizing Resources?

When right-sizing resources, you tweak your cloud infrastructure based on what your actual workload is like. The point is to spend exactly how much you should while also only using the resources that you require. 

You should use right-sizing for cost efficiency; without it, you could accidentally overspend. It’s also a good idea to use right-sizing so that performance and capacity are matched.

Here are two reasons you need to use right-sizing:

• Overprovisioning: Make sure you only pay for the capacity that you use. 
• Underprivisoning: You also need to ensure that you don’t have too little capacity as to not impact your performance and customer experience. 

You’ll need to focus on four aspects. These are: 

1. Continuous Monitoring: Assess your resource utilization and increase/decrease as required. 
2. Dynamic Adjustment: Monitor demand changes and scale your resources based on these. 
3. For workloads with predictable patterns, consider utilizing providers offering Reserved Instances or Savings Plans. 
4. Scaling Automation: Trigger scaling based on thresholds that you define in advance.

Use these tools in your sizing: 

• Monitoring/Analytics: Look at insights within your dashboards and reports to determine what you need to do as next steps. 
• Auto-Scaling: Set pre-defined conditions to adjust resources on your server. 
• Cost Management: Look at tools where you can track your spending and determine if you have unnecessary costs. 
• Recommendations Engines: Identify usage patterns and consider whether you need to scale up or down.

This depends on different factors, such as workload nature and variability. Adjust and monitor more often if your workload changes frequently. On the other hand, you might need periodic reviews if you roughly know what your workload is.

Regardless of what you do, you should set a clear review window (e.g. monthly). During these reviews, assess to see the extent to which your resources are aligned. Doing this is necessary if you want to maintain performance while simultaneously optimizing the costs of your cloud.