Expert Advice: How to Rightsize Memory-Intensive AWS Resources
To achieve cost optimization, rightsizing becomes an ongoing process. Even if you rightsize workloads initially, changing performance and capacity requirements can result in underused or idle resources that drive unnecessary AWS costs.
Most organizations continuously rightsize their AWS resources to align with business needs and anticipated demand. Since there is no historical data for a new workload, you may end up guessing about instance types. As you collect historical utilization for existing workloads, you can rightsize the resource based on analysis of that data.
When you think about rightsizing your container resources, it’s essential to factor in both CPU and memory utilization. Some of our customers have CPU-intensive workloads such as 3D rendering, financial/scientific modeling, video encoding, or data mining. Others have memory-intensive workloads, such as large in-memory databases. nOps can analyze your usage and help you rightsize resources to save money on memory-intensive workloads
How to collect memory metrics
To collect metrics for memory instances, you need to install an Amazon CloudWatch agent and send those resources to CloudWatch. You can also use third-party tools like Datadog to factor in memory resources.
For any Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) task or service using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) launch type, your Amazon ECS container instances require version 1.4.0 or later of the container agent to enable CloudWatch metrics. However, it’s recommended to use the latest container agent. For information about checking your agent version, go to the ECS instances tab under the ECS cluster.
How nOps recommends optimal resources
The general rule is to rightsize against memory if you find that your maximum memory utilization is less than 40% over a four-week period.
nOps checks the average memory utilization for an Amazon EC2 instance over a two-week period and recommends an instance size with at least the average memory utilization available. For example: If the current instance type has 8GB of memory available, and the average memory utilization is 700MB over a two-week period, the rightsizing recommendation will suggest an instance type which has 1GB of available memory.
Finding idle resources
nOps analyzes the CPU utilization for the last two weeks and finds the average idle utilization. When you sort your resources by idle CPU, you can quickly find idle resources. You’ll probably find out that someone may have launched these resources for testing and forgot to shut them down in many cases. So it’s recommended that you review idle resources regularly. nOps makes it easy for you to do so.
Want nOps to analyze your usage and rightsize resources to save money on your workloads? Get started with the nOps Rightsizing feature today. Click here to get started with a free trial of nOps (or click here to sign in to nOps if you’re already a user).
