Rearchitecting for Cloud: Cost-Con-
scious Changes at the Application Level
So far, we have focused primarily on how to reduce and con-
trol your costs by adopting new behaviors and becoming
savvy about how you consume different services. But there
are also enormous opportunities to reduce ongoing cloud
costs by rethinking your application architectures. In addi-
tion to performance and feature enhancements, refactoring
your applications to take full advantage of cloud-native ser-
vices can lead to a lower cost of operation. Consider whether
or not your applications could benefit from the following
options:
Autoscaling:
The unparalleled elasticity of cloud allows for rapid horizon-
tal scaling, which effectively performs the rightsizing
described above, but in real time. This type of near-instan-
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SUMMER 2019
taneous scaling is ideal for applications with decoupled
architectures, which experience large fluctuations in
demand. Enabling autoscaling prevents you from over-pro-
visioning for the peaks and can trim the number of servers
to as little as one, to reduce costs when there is minimal
load on the application.
Low-Impact Disaster Recovery:
Traditional disaster recovery (DR) architectures can be
inherently expensive, requiring a full duplicate set of pro-
duction resources sitting idly in a secondary data center.
Depending on the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) requirements of an appli-
cation, a DR solution can be architected in the cloud with a
much smaller (and cheaper) footprint. For example, a pilot
light architecture requires only that an application’s data
and some minimal services be replicated into another
region, allowing for a much smaller footprint and lower cost
than your traditional DR architecture.