Rightsizing
Matching provisioned resources to observed demand rather than to a guess.
4 to work through
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intermediate
A platform team cuts CPU and memory requests across 900 Kubernetes deployments. Average pod requests drop 40%, the rightsizing dashboard shows the win, and three weeks later the monthly node bill is unchanged. Where did the saving go?
2 min answer -
intermediate
A platform's rightsizing programme reduces instance sizes based on average utilisation, and incidents follow. What was wrong with the method?
2 min answer -
intermediate
A rightsizing proposal moves 180 steady services from 4-vCPU general-purpose instances to 2-vCPU burstable instances because average CPU is 9%, projecting a 55% saving. Several of those services run a two-hour nightly batch. Review the proposal - what would you change, what would you keep, and what would you leave alone?
2 min answer -
intermediate
An automated tool recommends reducing your instances by 60% based on average CPU utilisation. What do you check before accepting?
2 min answer
3 terms in this topic
Bin-Packing Efficiency
The share of purchased node capacity that scheduled workloads have actually reserved, which is the missing link between a rightsizing campaign and th…
practiceRightsizing
Matching provisioned resources to measured need — the fastest large cost reduction available, and one that must respect headroom requirements.
metricUtilisation Floor
The minimum utilisation a resource should sustain before it is considered over-provisioned, set with enough margin for failure and peak.
Neighbouring topics
Cost & FinOps
General material on the economics of an architecture.
Total Cost of Ownership
Lifetime cost including people, operations, upgrades and exit.
Cloud Pricing Models
On-demand, committed and spot, and the crossover arithmetic.
Reserved & Committed Capacity
Committing the baseline, laddering terms, and expiry as a silent failure.
Spot & Interruptible Capacity
Deep discounts for work that can be interrupted and resumed.
Unit Economics
Cost per request, per tenant, per transaction — the actionable number.
Cost per Request
Fully-loaded per-unit cost, including the lines usually left out.
Storage Costs
Tiering, lifecycle policies, retrieval charges and minimum durations.
Network & Egress Costs
Cross-zone and cross-region transfer that appears on no diagram.
Compute Optimisation
Instance families, utilisation, and architecture that wastes less.
Cost Allocation
Tagging enforced at provisioning, and apportioning shared costs.
Showback & Chargeback
Making teams see, or own, the cost of what they run.
Architecture Cost Modelling
Pricing a design before building it, at expected and at ten times volume.
Cost vs Reliability
Each nine costing an order of magnitude, and pricing the failure instead.
Observability Cost
Telemetry bills, cardinality control and retention tiering.
Licence & Vendor Costs
Per-core, per-seat and per-environment terms that shape designs.
FinOps Practice
Inform, optimise, operate — and cost as a design-review criterion.
Waste Elimination
Idle environments, orphaned volumes, forgotten instances, dead data.
Cost Governance
Budgets, anomaly alerts, quotas and preventive policy.