Oracle Rewards! Oracle recently launched a new program selling ocean-front property in Arkansas. Bonus! North of the Arctic Circle in Alaska, they also have land available for purchase. Rewards and Credits! The deal is that for every acre you buy in Alaska, you get a credit toward your Arkansas property! Sounds like a good deal, right? Except however, when you fully understand that Arkansas is not on the ocean, and you have zero need for land in Alaska (no offense meant to Alaskans). Yes, they are not really selling land, but in classic Oracle fashion, they have put together a ‘rewards’ program that purports to lower your support costs but ...
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Cloud spend is anticipated to continue its massive growth trajectory for the foreseeable future. However, the spend does not have to match that same growth curve! To help our Clients maintain sound Cloud Optimization programs, we've assembled a series of articles and tips called: 12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series (note: request a download of all 12 here). Our seventh chapter in the series: Use Spot Pricing Spot Instances are spare compute capacity at a steep discount (up to 90%) to On-Demand Instances. Spot Instances can go down with very little notice. While they are frequently used to supplement On-Demand Instances, they aren’t meant to ...
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Cloud spend is anticipated to continue its massive growth trajectory for the foreseeable future. However, the spend does not have to match that same growth curve! To help our Clients maintain sound Cloud Optimization programs, we've assembled a series of articles and tips called: 12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series (note: request a download of all 12 here). Our sixth chapter in the series: CloudWatch with Autoscaling AWS CloudWatch (Azure Monitor, GCP Monitoring) enables you to collect consumption metrics and set up alarms to invoke actions. These tools collect these metrics, allows you to visualize them and to define alarms with the ...
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Cloud spend is anticipated to continue its massive growth trajectory for the foreseeable future. However, the spend does not have to match that same growth curve! To help our Clients maintain sound Cloud Optimization programs, we've assembled a series of articles and tips called: 12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series (note: request a download of all 12 here). Our fifth chapter in the series: Size it Right! Once you have deployed resources for a while, you have to check that your instances are optimal. For most clients, instances are set with the right configuration at time of the launch. As your consumption and business environment evolve, ...
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Cloud spend is anticipated to continue its massive growth trajectory for the foreseeable future. However, the spend does not have to match that same growth curve! To help our Clients maintain sound Cloud Optimization programs, we've assembled a series of articles and tips called: 12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series (note: request a download of all 21 here). Today we review the fourth installment in the series: Power-Cycle It. A large portion of the cloud waste originates from idle and low utilization instances. This is particularly relevant for non-production (e.g. development, testing, QA, etc.) instances and applications with consumption ...
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Cloud spend is anticipated to continue its massive growth trajectory for the foreseeable future. However, the spend does not have to match that same growth curve! To help our Clients maintain sound Cloud Optimization programs, we've assembled a series of articles and tips called: 12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series (note: request a download of all 21 here). Today we review the third installment in the series: Demand Management. It is critical that workloads and their consumption profile match with the appropriate cloud infrastructure. Most of the cloud waste originates from a lack of consistent, dynamic governance. With few clicks, any ...
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Working with our Clients during a time of heightened need has given us a unique perspective on the market with an ability to see the Industry in real time and in practical terms. Being ahead of the market has its advantages in that we can see the ‘up and comers’ emerging; those technology suppliers who are showing up in more Client accounts offering high value solutions with real world application and practical use cases. In our first ever post of its kind, here is our list of the Top 10 Technology Suppliers to Watch in 2021: One: Veeva Category: Life Sciences Data Management Location: Pleasanton, CA By: Steve Zolman Veeva Systems is the ...
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Cloud spend is anticipated to continue its massive growth trajectory for the foreseeable future. However, the spend does not have to match that same growth curve! To help our Clients maintain sound Cloud Optimization programs, we've assembled a series of articles and tips called: 12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series (note: request a download of all 21 here). Today we review the second installment in the series: Consolidation. Consolidating under-utilized and over-utilized instances out of your fleet can be a quick start on the path of cost savings. By leveraging native analytics, you can generate recommendations toward consolidation (e.g. ...
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Cloud is an integral part of almost every company's strategic technology portfolio. As legacy migrations continue and cloud spend increases across every industry, its never been more critical to understand both your specific cloud investments, and the suppliers (AWS) that drive them. Only those that fully understand these market dynamics will enjoy the competitive advantage that comes with informed insight. Conversely, those who fail to comprehend their waste, overspend and the market dynamics behind it, are doomed to escalating spend, blown budgets, and lagging transformation efforts. Below we give you that market insight, updates on AWS as ...
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Shut it off. Simple right? Sounds like something you might say to your children whenever they leave the light on in a room. But like any endeavor, shutting off instances in the cloud does take some amount of wherewithal and effort. Begin by identifying idle and under-utilized instances out of your fleet. By leveraging native analytics (e.g. AWS Trusted Advisor, AWS CloudWatch, Azure Advisor, Google Compute Engine), you can generate a list of these instances across regions and workloads. After a quick audit with your technology team or application owners, you can take a step toward savings realization by: Terminating/deleting idle instances ...
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