The recent shift and rapid change in the business industry has necessitated the need for businesses to not just remain at one point but to scale up in order to improve overall performance. To do this, the importance of cloud optimization becomes necessary as it encompasses measures to improve software quality, cross-team collaboration, application performance, and ongoing feedback across the organization.
A strong cloud optimization strategy helps ensure an immediate and long-term return on your investment when moving to the cloud. It also helps increase developer productivity and supports the migration of business operations from on-premise environments to the cloud.
In optimizing cloud infrastructure, here are five tips to guide you through the process:

1.      Select appropriate instances
As an organization, for you to see results, there is a need to understand your workload's resource needs and get an instance type with appropriate characteristics for it. VMs are the most common instance type in the cloud, though container variants are proliferating quickly. The goal is to right-size the instance with the best allotment of virtual CPUs (vCPUs), memory and specialized characteristics. If the instance is too big, the extra resources have little benefit on the cloud workload performance and will ultimately waste money. If the instance is too small, it will impair performance -- if the workload runs at all.
This is why it is important to select the right instance that works for your organization’s needs.

2.      Invest in Monitoring and Measurement:
To effectively optimize your cloud infrastructure, you first need to invest in measurement and monitoring to find out how your present cloud infrastructure is performing, that is, carrying out a clear and complete visibility into how your cloud infrastructure is performing so that you can track the factors that impact efficiency, performance, and cost. Just like you need medical tests to ascertain what health condition you have, you also need to measure what your cloud can do and what areas you need to work on. 

3.      Leverage Automation
Manually deploying and operating enterprise workloads is complex and time-consuming work. It involves many repetitive tasks, including configuration, sizing, provisioning cloud resources like virtual machines (VMs), setting up networking, load balancing, and managing scaling and high availability. Although these manual processes are effective, they can also be inefficient and cause inadvertent errors that require troubleshooting efforts, further delaying workload availability, thereby exposing the workload to security vulnerabilities that put the entire enterprise at risk. Cloud automation eliminates these manual processes. You can set up cloud automation by using orchestration and automation tools that can run on top of your virtualized environment.

4.      Supplement Cloud Network with Caches
While storing data in cloud servers is a good way to conveniently facilitate remote access, transferring it all to and from your local network is another problem altogether. Moving the data takes time, which could hamper your applications’ responsiveness.
One way you could effectively speed up the transfer process is to utilize cache services that are compatible with your cloud platform. Instead of loading files from the original cloud server, your applications will quickly retrieve data from the nearest located cache server.

5.      Implement Cloud Cost Intelligence
Cloud efficiency is not achievable without minimizing cost. Due to this reason, your cloud performance optimization should always go hand-in-hand with cloud cost management.
With this, it is clear that for a business or an organization to perform effectively, there is a need for cloud optimization. By moving to Layer3Cloud, you get access to experts who are well equipped to handle and oversee the cloud optimization process.