Jump to Content
Google Cloud

Save money, improve performance with new VM Rightsizing Recommendations

July 28, 2016
Pawel Siarkiewicz

Product Manager

Here at Google Cloud Platform, we pride ourselves on efficiency and reducing waste, from our datacenters all the way to individual virtual machine instances. We want to make sure that our users are getting good value for their money. To that end, VM Rightsizing Recommendations is now in beta.

Knowing which VM machine type to choose before you start running your workloads is challenging, especially given that your load may change over time. Select a machine that’s too large and you overpay. Select a machine that’s too small and your service is starved for resources. And while it’s possible to split some workloads amongst identical machines and use Managed Instance Group Autoscaler to balance resources, that doesn’t work for all workloads. Some workloads such as databases or file servers can’t be easily distributed.

VM Rightsizing Recommendations can help you see at a glance if your machines are the right size for the work that you assigned them. It monitors your CPU and RAM usage over time and makes recommendations about the size of your VMs. When applicable, it estimates how much you could save or whether your instances are overloaded and displays that information right on the VM Instances page — just look for the light bulb!

https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/rightsizing-1hj2g.max-700x700.PNG
The VM instances page shows instances where you can save money or increase performance as well as estimated savings per instance in total (click to enlarge)

When you’re ready, you can resize your VMs with a single click. And if your workload changes and your machine type is no longer a fit, we’ll let you know.

For more information about the VM Rightsizing Recommendations beta, including how we come up with the recommendations, click here.

Posted in