This article discusses how Cambia Health Solutions leveraged Datadog Cloud Cost Management and Resource Catalog to achieve significant savings by optimizing their Amazon RDS instances. It highlights strategies for standardizing database configurations and improving Reserved Instance utilization across a large cloud environment, offering insights into operational cost management within cloud architecture.
Read original on Datadog BlogManaging cloud costs effectively is a critical aspect of system design, especially in large-scale deployments. This case study demonstrates how a strategic approach to resource standardization and utilization can lead to substantial savings while maintaining operational efficiency.
Organizations often face 'cloud sprawl' where a lack of centralized oversight leads to fragmented resource provisioning. This results in underutilized or over-provisioned resources, particularly for database services like Amazon RDS, directly impacting the bottom line. Addressing this requires robust visibility and governance mechanisms.
Cambia Health Solutions tackled this by standardizing their Amazon RDS instances. This involved defining a limited set of approved instance types and configurations (e.g., storage, backup policies) to prevent arbitrary provisioning. Standardization simplifies management, reduces complexity, and enables better forecasting for resource planning.
Architectural Benefit: Standardization
Standardizing database configurations not only reduces costs but also improves maintainability, simplifies patching and upgrades, and enhances security posture by limiting configuration drift.
A key component of cloud cost savings is maximizing the utilization of Reserved Instances (RIs). The article highlights how Datadog's tools helped Cambia identify underutilized RIs and consolidate instances to achieve higher RI coverage, effectively turning variable on-demand costs into predictable, lower-cost reserved commitments. This requires a clear understanding of an organization's resource consumption patterns.
From a system design perspective, this emphasizes the importance of a lifecycle management strategy for cloud resources, integrating cost optimization into the operational aspects of a system rather than treating it as an afterthought. Tools like Datadog's Resource Catalog provide the necessary observability to make informed decisions for cost-efficient infrastructure.