As of late I’ve been making it somewhat of a personal goal to try to learn more about cloud – AWS in particular. I’ve been going through the training over at acloud.guru, messing around with the free tier in AWS, and toying with the possibility of writing my AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate exam. Now, one thing that I have learned over the past couple of months is that AWS is a beast – there is a lot of services provided – and gaining visibility into these services, from both a cost and performance aspect seems next to impossible. Now this post isn’t going to be focused around my struggles, but more so on how Turbonomic (formerly VMTurbo), more specifically the recently announced 5.9 version, can help organizations to bridge that visibility gap and achieve that ultimate goal of achieving maximum performance at a minimum cost.
Turbonomic 5.9 – Making Hybrid Cloud possible.
Although this is a minor release it certainly does come with some major enhancements to the product in terms of cloud integration. Turbonomic has always done a great job at monitoring our on-premises environments – ensuring that VMs and services are right sized and running in the most cost efficient way, yet ensuring that performance and SLAs have been met. Their supply-demand analytics engine is next to none when in it comes determining these placements, automatically resolving issues, and providing an instant ROI to organizations datacenters. That said more and more organizations are now looking to move away from housing their own datacenters and investigating cloud enabled solutions, be it public, private, or a hybrid model – and, in a typical customer fashion – we really want to use the same tools and concepts that we are used to. Turbonomic 5.9 seems to deliver on this expectation with the addition of a number of cloudy features to the product (summarized below)
- Cloud Migration Planning – 5.9 gives us the ability to perform very in-depth cost analysis of moving our workloads to the public cloud. IE. What would it cost me to move workload x to Amazon? What would the costs be with migrating workload a and b to Azure? What’s the cost comparison of migrating workload x from this AWS region to this Azure region? Getting cost estimates from Azure, AWS, and SoftLayer in regards to these questions is very beneficial when performing feasibility studies around cloud adoption and migration.
- Workload Specific Costing – Once we have our workloads in the cloud, Turbonomic will now track and report cost metrics, in real-time back to the dashboard.
- Cloud Budgeting – Imagine setting a defined budget for your cloud services and seeing just how that budget is being consumed across the different regions, tags, and workloads defined with in it. Aside from seeing your real-time budget impacts, Turbonomic will also take into account past costs in order to project future cloud consumption costs based on your growth and performance needs. Also, if you have some sort of discounted account or agreement with either of the cloud providers, Turbonomic uses your credentials – so they are getting YOUR actual costs – not industry averages!
- Lower Cloud Costs – This is really what Turbonomic is about IMO – ensuring you a reaching maximum performance at the lowest cost – and now we see this in the cloud as well. Think about gaining visibility into what it my cost to scale up to a larger instance, or how much you can save by scaling down. Turbonomic can predict these costs as well as even automatically scale these instances down, or better yet, suspend them during times they aren’t needed.
So yeah – all the benefits of the previous version of Turbonomic is now applicable to cloud – allowing organizations to get that “single pane of glass” cost viewing of both their on-premises workloads next to their AWS, Azure, or SoftLayer workloads as well! Certainly these aren’t the only enhancements that have been released with 5.9 – we are also blessed with some pretty hefty performance impacts to the analytics engine as well – think 9 minutes to analyze and report on 100,000 VMs – not too shabby. Also, as highlighted during their TFD presentations recently – the HTML5 interface is currently running in “dual” mode – with the intention of having all functionality fully available by the end of 2017! But to me, the meat and potatoes of this release revolve around cloud. Turbonomic answers a lot of the costing questions that come with cloud – and from what they claim, can lower your cloud bill by an average of 30%! That should enable for a very fast ROI for organizations! If you want to read more about the new features as I haven’t covered off all of them, definitely check out the Turbonomic “What’s New” page! Also Vladan Seget has a great round up on his blog as well as Dave Henry on his! And hey – if you want to check it all out for yourself you can grab yourself a free 30 day full featured trial of Turbomonic here!
