Enterprises need to choose appropriate cloud products and resource specifications to meet business requirements. In addition to cost, requirements such as stability, performance, security compliance, and operational efficiency should also be considered during application load design and resource selection. A balance should be achieved between objectives and costs.
Design an application load that is suitable for the business does not mean lower costs only. Firstly, it is necessary to fully understand the requirements from various aspects. Purely pursuing low costs usually means compromising in other aspects. After fully understanding the requirements from various aspects, the requirements for various aspects of application loads should be prioritized based on the characteristics of the business. A choice can be made after comprehensive consideration.
Cost and Reliability
If high reliability is required for the business, the designed application load will also require high resource costs. For example, if strict requirements are in place for service levels (SLA), recovery time objectives (RTO), recovery point objectives (RPO), more resources will be needed for cross-zone or cross-region deployment, and cross-region data replication will also increase costs. Some suggestions as follows:
Enterprises can divide application loads based on business priorities, determine reliability priorities, and choose appropriate reliability solutions.
Production environments recommended to choose high-reliability solutions such as active-active deployment. For important data, redundancy within the same city and cross-region backup can be chosen to ensure data security.
Testing environments reliability requirements can be reduced to save costs.
For more reliability considerations, please refer to the Reliability pillar.
Cost and Performance
Application loads with high performance requirements usually come with higher costs. Enterprises need to set performance requirements for application loads based on the characteristics of the business and strike a balance between performance and cost. Some suggestions as follows:
Conduct performance tests during the resource selection phase and increase purchases only after meeting the requirements.
Introduce elasticity mechanisms, pay attention to resource utilization of application loads, peak stress periods, etc., and dynamically adjust resource supply to meet demand.
Select appropriate billing methods based on business characteristics. For example, for businesses with high requirements for public network bandwidth and stable traffic peaks, bandwidth billing can be used and the purchase of Shared Bandwidth is recommended.
Burstable performance instances can be used according to business scenarios to meet burst performance demands and optimize costs.
For more performance considerations, please refer to the Performance Efficiency pillar.
Cost and Security Compliance
Application loads with high security requirements usually come with higher costs. Enterprises need to set security requirements for application loads based on business characteristics and avoid compromises on security and compliance. Some suggestions as follows:
Compliance audits: Use products such as Control Policy, Cloud Config, ActionTrail, etc. to achieve ongoing compliance in the cloud. Currently, these products are available for free (subject to official website billing instructions).
Network security: Use Cloud Firewall for network security protection, supporting the management and control of multiple accounts without the need to purchase repeatedly for each account.
Key security: Use Key Management Service for unified key management, supporting the sharing of instances across multiple accounts without the need to purchase repeatedly for each account.
For more security compliance considerations, please refer to the Security pillar.
Cost and Operational Excellence
Building observable systems, standard change processes, and automated processes are important components of operational excellence. Enterprises usually incur additional costs during the initial construction phase, but costs gradually decrease over time. Effective cost management in the cloud is also an important part of improving operational efficiency for enterprises. Some suggestions as follows:
Use cloud-native PaaS monitoring products to avoid the maintenance costs and stability issues associated with self-maintained infrastructure.
Use infrastructure automation orchestration tools such as Terraform to build automated processes, make infrastructure code-oriented, and reduce development and operation costs.
For more operational considerations, please refer to the Operational Excellence pillar.
