After comparing the different solutions of Infrastructure as a Service available on the market in one of our previous articles, I want to answer one of the most frequently asked questions that our technical department receives: What type and size of instance in the Public Cloud should I choose?
Both are very sensitive topics: even if the scalability of resources in the Public Cloud renders the service supple to meet your needs at all times, overestimating or underestimating the necessary resources does not optimize your Cloud infrastructure. On the contrary, it involves a waste of time, resources and, consequently, money.
Precisely because the choice of the instance is not a trivial process and various considerations and factors derive from it, it may be advantageous to follow some Best Practices useful both in our Public Cloud and in other Cloud Providers.
What are the infrastructure requirements of your application?
Before you start implementing an infrastructure, it's important to ask yourself: What do I need in terms of application levels? What resources do I need to effectively respond to my workload? What are my archiving needs?
Among these questions, one of the most important is: is my application written and optimized for Single-core or multi-core?
Depending on this characteristic, in fact, different resources will be required. In the case of optimized single-core applications, calculations are performed with one core, which is sufficient for simple or low-intensive applications. On the other hand, if the application requires more cores and can use multiple processing units at the same time, it is more suitable for applications that require intensive processing of simultaneous tasks.
However, even if an application uses more cores to achieve greater overall processing capacity and better performance, actual scalability depends on the type of application and system architecture. In fact, not all applications are able to take full advantage of the benefits of using multiple cores. This means that they may not get significant benefits from using a CPU with a large number of cores.
Another equally important component in choosing a flavor in Public Cloud is certainly the attached disc And his performances. In CloudFire you can choose between multiple types of storage:
- Direct Attached Storage, that is, high-performance storage connected directly to compute resources with local redundancy;
- Block Storage not directly integrated with the flavor of various types such as: standard, LTS SSD.
- AND Scalable Storage, that is, an externally integrated storage compatible with the S3 protocol and redundant 3 times, but we'll talk about this later!
What Flavor options do you have in Public Cloud?
In addition to analyzing the computational resources necessary for your infrastructure, it is essential to know the types of flavors available in the Public Cloud and then understand which ones may best meet your requirements.
At the moment, the following flavors are available in our Public Cloud:
- General Purpose v2 with Intel Xeon Gold Scalable architecture on Dell PowerEdge hardware, designed specifically for enterprise applications such as business applications, web services, VoIP PBXs, Kubernetes container clusters, and a wide range of cloud-native services. This choice represents a good balance between cost and performance for a wide range of cloud applications.
- CPU Optimized v2 with Intel Xeon Gold Scalable architecture on Dell PowerEdge hardware, designed to achieve maximum computing performance for specific applications such as database servers, HPC, machine learning, and data analysis. Instead, it's the perfect flavor for running mission-critical applications sensitive to latencies, offering optimal performance with the latest CPUs.
At this point, you'll have analyzed your application requirements and the types of instances available. It is therefore time to select the Size of your flavor in the Public Cloud, or the combination of CPU and RAM.
When sizing an instance, if the application requires the management of load peaks or has dynamic scalability needs, remember that you can change flavors and switch to a more suitable one at any time in a few clicks, ensuring the correct resources for the needs of each workload.
herein find a list of our flavors.
Balance cloud costs and performance
Before making the final decision, a definitely important consideration is to find a poise between costs and performance. It is necessary to find a point where the needs of the application are met without wasting resources.
Larger, more powerful instances offer better performance, but they also have higher costs. On the other hand, smaller instances may be cheaper, but they may not provide the necessary performance.
As for the costs, in CloudFire you will find a price based completely on consumption. In a way transparent and clear, you can get an idea of what your investment may be and adjust accordingly.
As for the performance, instead it is necessary to introduce the benchmarks as a tool for evaluating and comparing performance between different resources.
In general, CPU and RAM benchmarks provide critical information for sizing, comparing, optimizing, and resolving performance issues within a Public Cloud. In fact, they make it possible to ensure that resources are properly allocated and that the instance works as efficiently as possible to support the hosted application.
Here is a summary table of the flavor benchmarks available in Public Cloud CloudFire using Geekbench, an instrument that measures the single-core and multi-core power of the flavor processors available in the Public Cloud.
In fact, in the following graph, you can see, for the same core, the General Purpose and CPU optimized flavors compared. In fact, it is evident that the latter perform better than the former.
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, the choice of the instance will depend on many factors such as the underlying stack, your performance expectations, and the needs of your business. It is clear that the The sizing of an infrastructure evolves over time, but planning ahead can help you scale it according to your business objectives.
