Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure: A Complete Workload Placement, Cost Management, and Optimization Checklist

The success of your enterprise’s digital transformation relies in no small part on your hybrid cloud infrastructure, which SearchCloud Computing defines as “a cloud computing environment that uses a mix of on-premises, private cloud and third-party, public cloud services with orchestration between these platforms.” Because this infrastructure is not a homogeneous environment, migration, management, and optimization can be an ongoing challenge. Use this checklist to help you cover all your bases to ensure that your hybrid cloud infrastructure serves the needs of your business.

Ensure Successful Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Migration 

✔ Pick the right cloud migration model. 
There’s no one right way to migrate applications to the cloud. The options range from a simple “lift and shift” to a complete re-write, and everything in between. The best option for any application will depend on your organization’s goals, available resources, workloads, and priorities. (Learn more about the different cloud migration options)

✔ Understand which workloads should and should not be migrated.
Just because it can go into the cloud doesn’t mean it should. Not all workloads are ideal for cloud deployment. Fortunately, application migration doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing proposition. You can migrate some workloads to gain cloud benefits while keeping others on premises to avoid certain issues that could unnecessarily cost you time, money, and effort. (Learn more about why some workloads should stay on-premises)

✔ Perform a baseline assessment.
To effectively plan for migrating workloads to the cloud, you need to understand where they’re coming from. This is where baselines come in. A baseline assessment will help you identify issues that must be addressed before you migrate, and it provides a reference point for comparing utilization and performance in the new cloud environment. (Learn more about baselines)

✔ Understand workload dependencies and create move groups.
You can’t migrate all of your workloads in one fell swoop, so you need to understand the dependencies between related applications, infrastructure, and service sets. Then you can create a prioritized plan of move groups—groups of workloads that are targeted to be migrated together.  (Learn more about move groups)

✔ Evaluate workloads based on size and objective.
Selecting the optimal instance size and volume types to meet your workload needs in the cloud isn’t a straightforward sorting exercise. You need to understand workload behavior during peak business hours over time, and that data needs to be granular—averages and sampling could lead to faulty assumptions. Then you need to understand workload objective—its purpose and your tolerance for performance risk—so you can make the optimal selection accordingly. (Learn more about workload evaluation)

✔ Operationalize cloud migration.
Cloud migration isn’t a one-and-done event. You’ll have to continue to move workloads from on premises to a public cloud, from one public cloud to another, and even from the public cloud back on premises. This means that you need to build in the visibility, processes, and tracking to manage the ongoing transitions into your standard IT operations. (Learn more about operationalizing cloud migration)

Improve Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Cost Management 

✔ Demystify your cloud bill(s).
The typical cloud bill doesn’t make it easy to understand exactly what you’re spending and where those costs are coming from. Your cloud service provider (CSP) likely provides cost analysis tools, but they don’t necessarily help you answer the specific questions you may have—or may not enable you to do so easily. You need more flexible bill analysis capabilities that let you group and filter the data from your bill in a variety of ways—by attributes, tags, time period, and other settings—to get a better understanding of the billing details.

✔ Perform multi-dimensional analysis. 
Your organization is complex and a one-dimensional view simply won’t allow you to slice and dice your data in the way you need to. To enable a more nuanced analysis, you need to be able to analyze your cloud costs across multiple dimensions. For example, grouping your data by day will show daily costs, and grouping by service can show you the same data by service, but to truly understand your spend, you want to be able see how much each service contributed to the daily total—and then be able to get a line-item breakdown with the details. (Learn more about getting valuable insight from your cost analysis)

✔ Easily customize reports. 
Different stakeholders in your organization require different types of information, so you need to be able to customize reports—to get data for charge-back billing, to identify data transfer costs per entity, or to determine which resources might be underutilized, to name just a few—and they need to be easy to set up and distribute as appropriate. 

✔ See cost vs. utilization on a per-instance basis.
In order to understand the true costs of your instances/VMs, you need to see how they are being utilized, along with a breakdown of the spend, including associated data transfer fees, reservations, and savings plans. With per-instance visibility into cloud spend and utilization, you can easily identify expensive instances and compare them against utilization, type, entities, tags, and data transfer rates.

✔ Get cost and performance visibility across multiple clouds.
If you’ve got a multi-cloud infrastructure with each cloud operating independently, it can be difficult and time-consuming to manage your overall cloud costs. Instead of stitching together disparate data from multiple CSPs, you need a global view of your cloud utilization, performance, and spend across your multi-cloud infrastructure. (Learn more about creating visibility across multiple clouds) 

Maximize Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Optimization

✔ Identify idle resources.
One of the benefits of the cloud is that it’s very easy to turn up new resources when you need them. But if you forget to then turn them off when you no longer need them, you could end up with a lot of idle and abandoned billable resources that can cost you a lot of money without delivering any value. You need to be able to find and eliminate cloud waste, such as unused compute instances, storage on stopped instances, storage blocks no longer attached to a compute instance, unattached load balancers, and idle elastic IP addresses. (Learn more about cloud waste)

✔ Tune sizing based on risk tolerance.
The definition of “optimal” is subjective when it comes to the cloud—and it depends on the level of risk you’re willing to assume. You need to be able to perform a what-if analysis that includes CPU, memory, I/O, and ingress and egress charges to get a full picture of your options and then tune sizing to meet your definition of optimal. (Learn more about tuning sizing based on risk tolerance)

✔ Get rightsizing recommendations.
Once you know what “optimal” looks like for you, you need to evaluate your configuration options. But with thousands of choices available, this can be a daunting task. To greatly facilitate this process, you want to be able to get rightsizing recommendations so you can select the best fit for your needs. Additionally, you want to be able to quickly adjust to changes in CSP offerings to optimize cost structures on an ongoing basis. 

✔ Facilitate action.
It’s not enough to just understand what you need to do to rightsize, you need to take action to make it happen. If you have to manually enter change requests into ServiceNow or Jira to activate recommended cost-savings opportunities, your process is cumbersome and inefficient. You need to be able to automatically feed recommendations into your change management tool for one-click action taking.

✔ Improve reservation planning.
Reservations offer the potential for good discounts to achieve long-term savings. Poor reservation planning can, however, result in costly mistakes. You need to accurately account for daily peak and non-peak usage to prevent over-commitment of reservation discounts. And you want the ability to track the amortized value of your reservation discount usage at the instance level. 

Virtana: Your Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Partner

With Virtana Platform, you can manage your entire IT infrastructure across on-premises, public cloud, and hybrid cloud deployments with our cloud transformation platform that leverages AIOps, ML, and data-driven analytics for efficient migration and ongoing optimization of hybrid cloud performance, capacity, and cost. With Workload Placement module, you can accelerate and de-risk cloud migration. And with Virtana Cloud Cost Management, you can optimize your capacity and costs in real time on an ongoing basis. 
Try Virtana Cloud Cost Management for free