IBM Turbonomic – Automation on AWS

As public cloud adoption accelerates, complexity and cost increase.

In 2024, worldwide spending on public cloud services is forecasted to grow 20,4% to $678 billion (Gartner press release 13-11-2023). Executives estimate that at least 30% of their cloud spending is wasted and 7 in 10 organisation have experienced higher than expected cloud costs, demonstrating the need for effective cloud planning. 

IT exists to deliver and run applications that help the business 

One reason IT is so critical to an organization is the responsibility to deliver and run business applications that help the business meet business objectives. It’s almost impossible for humans - no matter how skilled in DevOps, SRE or cloud - to continuously determine the exact compute, storage and database configurations for cloud applications, in order to deliver performance at the lowest cost. For example, organizations increase the allocation of cloud infrastructure to avoid application performance risks, then often end up with an unnecessarily high cloud bill.   

Several software vendors focus on “cost reduction”, “savings” and “cost optimization”. Which, in our opinion isn’t right, since IT exists to support the business. Application performance must be king! It’s important for Finance and IT Ops to validate that IT operations are optimized, and they are not spending more than they need. They also need to have the elasticity to meet business priorities as they arise. So how do you accomplish this? 

To enable successful business outcomes and customer experiences, IT teams must: 

• Defend the Spend: Always know exactly what they need to spend to deliver on IT business objectives, with proof that they are not spending more than needed. 
• Protect the Business: Spending less is meaningless if it puts the business at risk. Organizations need automated elasticity to continuously assure application performance at the lowest cost. 
• Plan for the Future: Understanding the current spend needed to meet business objectives will assure organizations make the best decisions for the future.  
  
  

How do you accomplish this in, for example, your AWS environment? 

In our services we use IBM Turbonomic. By doing so, your organization can contain cloud spend while also preserving application performance with: 

• AI-powered insights: to match application requirements with the appropriate number of resources from the cloud, such as CPU, memory, storage and network. It helps achieve lower costs without sacrificing performance, while continuing to meet business-level objectives.  
• Intelligent automation: we can automate actions related to application resourcing decisions, so that applications get the resources needed consistently as needed without human involvement. Intelligent automation proactively identifies bottlenecks and takes corrective actions to enhance performance and availability, freeing up IT to focus on key initiatives. 
• Cost optimization: automatically determine the correct virtual machine (VM) instance type for your cloud application workloads. For this, we use a wide range of metrics: vCPU, vMem, network & storage input/output (IO), throughput, reserved instance inventory, pricing and discounts, disk count, quota and available region. 
  
  
  

AWS Optimization 

Within our services, we automatically optimize real time your demand. IBM Turbonomic continuously generates actions that optimize EC2 instances, RDS databases, EBS volumes, and Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) based on real-time demand. Its prescribed actions help ensure performance while minimizing cost. Additionally, the IBM Turbonomic platform manages your RI inventory and directs actions that maximize RI utilization and coverage, all through the lens of application performance. 

Embedding IBM Turbonomic in our services, enables: 

• Efficiency that never risks performance: Application-aware, full-stack analytics ensure automation drives efficiency but never risks performance. 
• Automation that teams can trust: Engineering, Ops, and App teams always get the data they need to confidently execute actions, then adopt automation at scale. 
• Integrations that ensure operationalization: Automation can be integrated with pipelines, processes, and workflows. Customizable policies ensure business context mitigates risk. 
  
  

To summarize: Softline’s services based on IBM Turbonomic use machine learning algorithms to dynamically optimize the allocation of compute, storage & network resources, to ensure the best possible performance and utilization of resources. It helps organizations to manage their resources more efficiently and cost-effectively, and to avoid performance issues and downtime.  

Due to our partnerships with AWS and IBM, Softline can provide IBM Turbonomic’s SaaS-based service with even more flexible options. If you have committed purchase agreements or budgets with AWS Enterprise Discount Programs (EDP), you can leverage these funds to purchase this solution. Just give us a call, to realize all above-mentioned benefits!