At many companies, process optimization has been elevated to an art form—with one large, invisible exception. Across industries, cloud computing resources are routinely overprovisioned on a continuous, rolling basis. Overprovisioning doesn’t just waste enormous amounts of money; it also carries an immeasurable opportunity cost. Azure Blueprint for Sitecore, a managed cloud reference architecture built on best practices and processes, addresses both problems.
This two-part blog dives into how a continuously managed reference architecture reduces costs, and improves business agility and outcomes.
Unnecessary costs are just the beginning
Cloud resources are widely promoted as highly available and easily “spun up” or down in real-time. However, whether they’re being provisioned by internal business or IT organizations, or external digital agencies or consultants, human factors lead to an ongoing stream of net new cloud resources. These factors include:
- A general bias to over-provision, a factor amplified in a microservices world. Whereas two or three VMs were sufficient in the past, projects now often need hundreds of smaller pieces in a complex setup.
- Person A adds a resource, then leaves the project or the team. Team members B, C, D don’t want to risk removing the resource, because of the uncertainty of why it is there. The uncertainty is multiplied when the resources are provisioned by an external consultant who works with the organization for only a short time.
- Point-and-click simplicity enables tens of thousands of dollars of resources to be provisioned in just a few minutes.
Simply put, the purpose or justification of a provisioned resource is rarely documented, and the ease of provisioning is just as rarely governed by cleanup and optimization processes at the management level. This asymmetry leads a growing chasm of unnecessary spending between the amount of resources actually required and those paid for.
The impact of a managed reference architecture
Copenhagen Mist recently audited a Sitecore cloud environment with 1,200 resources in production. Many of these resources are dedicated to small projects, which makes it difficult to maintain a holistic view of the entire resource environment. Our analysis of this environment found:
- The resources provisioned for the Sitecore installation cost well over EUR 25.000 per month.
- The Sitecore environment had been well-executed, from a static point of view.
- The total cloud footprint contained multiple generations of various environments, each of which had been adjusted at multiple points but never strategically reviewed.
- In addition, one of the features of the environment cost EUR 10.000 a month in cloud resources to maintain, but was running at only 1% of capacity.
By switching to Azure Blueprint for Sitecore, the cloud resource spend could be reduced immediately by approximately 60% per month—without even taking into account potential cost savings from the resource running at 1% of capacity.
While results will vary by customer, this level of savings can be readily attained in large Sitecore environments that run on Azure Blueprint for Sitecore.
In my next blog I’ll talk about how Azure Blueprint for Sitecore delivers continuous improvement that, in turn, makes it easy for companies to keep cost in control and exploit new opportunities more quickly. Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter to keep up with our latest thinking and Copenhagen Mist news.