App-centric Model for Right-sizing your Application’s Cloud Infrastructure

I get asked many times for a quick example of the app-centric model for managing the cloud infrastructure. I take about a minute or so to give an example from the perspective of an application operations team Right-sizing the cloud infrastructure. As more and more applications move to the cloud platforms, Right-sizing as a practice is catching up for good reasons. Whether the applications are simply getting re-hosted on the cloud platforms or re-factored with platform services, Right-sizing is a key aspect of the application operations or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams today.

Traditional data-center IT operations teams have always dealt with Right-sizing an application’s infrastructure from the infrastructure-up model. There are many reasons why this approach has settled as a practice. One of the reasons is that the datacenter has limited capacity and there are many applications to be hosted on that limited capacity infrastructure. So, whenever a change to the particular application’s infrastructure is requested, IT operations teams go through the standard change management practice because they might affect other applications so. So, simple operations such as,

• Change a virtual machine’s memory because the application is running out of memory.
• Increase the number of virtual CPUs so I can at least temporarily fix the problem until the developer takes a deeper look.
• Make a simple configuration change to one of the platforms or the operations system, or even.
• Add additional storage to the file system so a database continues to run.

Cloud has shifted burden to App Ops teams!!!

Whether modifications are small or large, there is a process and that process always started from the infrastructure-up model. Some changes are easy and some are really hard depending on the type of the application and how ad-hoc a change is. When the same applications move to the cloud platforms, these applications can now be hosted or afford to be hosted on application specific infrastructures. Now the datacenter practices or the operations team’s technical debt need not be carried over to the new cloud platforms as well.

Appranix’s ServiceFormation platform helps with Right-sizing your application’s cloud infrastructure with a few clicks as shown in the animated video below.