Migrating workloads to the cloud and implementing effective infrastructure management allows organizations to harness the agility and innovative capabilities of Amazon Web Services (AWS). This transition enables the adoption of new services as they become available and allows businesses to scale operations according to demand. In this article, we will explore how a Fortune 500 company successfully achieved migration targets and cut their AWS expenses by 40 percent utilizing Turbonomic.
Turbonomic is recognized as an AWS Partner Network (APN) Advanced Technology Partner, holding AWS Competencies in Migration and Cloud Management Tools. Their autonomic platform aggregates usage data from applications and leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to make informed, full-stack decisions across compute, storage, and database resources automatically, without requiring user intervention.
Turbonomic Workload Automation
Turbonomic empowers clients by evaluating and optimizing their hybrid cloud environments in real-time. The platform can assess an on-premises infrastructure in just 45 minutes and can provide detailed insights into the compute, storage, and database resources—such as Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances (RIs)—needed for applications to operate at minimal costs, while adhering to business policies.
By utilizing AI, Turbonomic continuously learns from the performance and usage patterns of applications, enhancing resource balancing and predictions across both on-premises data centers and AWS Cloud. This significantly accelerates the cloud migration process.
The Challenge of Cost Control
A Fortune 500 enterprise launched a project aimed at transitioning a large portion of its data centers to AWS over several years. However, the IT director’s initiative to migrate over 400 workloads was halted as the CFO analyzed the monthly expenditure, which reached hundreds of thousands of dollars. Continuing on this trajectory would deplete the annual IT budget in just four months.
To meet digital transformation objectives, the IT director needed developers to utilize AWS services. Yet, further migrations were on hold until a more effective cost control strategy was established.
What Causes Digital Transformations to Stall?
This situation is increasingly common. Companies migrate to AWS to hasten their digital transformation yet face challenges that impede progress, leading to increased spending, limited technology adoption, and a diminished competitive edge in a rapidly evolving market. These challenges include:
- Overruns in cloud costs can halt or even reverse cloud adoption. According to Gartner, “45 percent of organizations that perform lift-and-shift to cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) without optimization will be over-provisioned by as much as 55 percent, and will overspend by 70 percent during the first 18 months.”
- Insufficient management agility. Many organizations not only enter the cloud over-provisioned but are also encumbered by rigid, ITIL-based management practices that contradict the agility required in the cloud. When decisions regarding cloud resource optimization require manual intervention, it becomes difficult to fully leverage elasticity.
Achieving True Digital Transformation
The Fortune 500 customer utilized Turbonomic’s agentless platform across their data center for three years, achieving a 50 percent increase in resource density, eliminating nearly half of their hosts, and saving close to $1 million in the first three months. This was accomplished while maintaining application performance.
To effectively manage costs and enhance their cloud initiative’s success, the organization adhered to two best practices—optimizing spend both initially and continuously. For further insights on this topic, check out another blog post here.
Optimize Up Front
Before migrating to AWS, Turbonomic assisted the customer in optimizing their remaining cloud migration targets, resulting in predictable cloud costs and getting the migration back on schedule.
Optimize Continuously
For the workloads already migrated to AWS, Turbonomic’s AI-driven decision engine automates various tasks, including the suspension or removal of unused resources, as well as more complex actions. Turbonomic continuously enhances RI utilization, combined with resizing, to maximize discounts across the entire environment, thereby increasing overall cloud cost savings.
Results: Enhanced Cloud Expenditure and Responsible Agility
By implementing these best practices, the customer managed to reduce their AWS costs by 40 percent, translating to nearly $200,000 in monthly savings. These savings represent just the beginning; as demand fluctuates for the 432 workloads and more workloads transition to AWS, Turbonomic’s capacity for continuous optimization will lead to additional savings.
With Turbonomic taking care of operational tasks, the customer’s IT team can empower developers and innovators to focus on new initiatives. By being “responsibly agile,” Turbonomic users can quickly adapt and consume cloud resources as needed, assured that their environment is consistently self-optimizing. For more resources, refer to this excellent link here.
Summary
Turbonomic facilitates seamless application migration to the cloud while maintaining control over infrastructure and spending. The platform can be deployed on-premises and within AWS, ensuring smooth transitions between the two and preventing resource over-provisioning.
To experience Turbonomic for yourself, you can deploy it as an on-premises virtual machine via AWS Marketplace.
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