A huge question in the back of the minds of CTOs, CIOs, and the like is whether or not they are able to shut down their cloud operations if ever need be.
Is it expensive? Time consuming? Or even possible?
Cloud veteran, Brendon De Meyer, has some key advice on the matter.
If You Have To Shut Down Your Cloud
If you have to shut down your cloud, what you need to remember is that getting your data out can be very expensive and challenging.
That is where those egress costs come into play.
The cloud is great at ingesting and productionising a lot of data very quickly. But it’s not great at spitting it out again, because they essentially don’t want you to opt out of their services.
However, if you get into the situation where you have to shut it down:
- Do you have to shut it down permanently or do you just need to park it for a small amount of time?
- Or are you looking at the cost management and considering operational hours, because you might not need that footprint running 24 hours a day.
If you need to do a complete shutdown, then doing that in a day is going to be difficult.
Unless you’ve already got your SRE processes in place, i.e. Making sure that you are doing your backups every day or doing your data retention in the right manner, then it’s easy to shut down.
Then all that you have to do is keep your storage buckets alive and get down to the least cost.
If you’re looking at a potential sort of holiday mode where your business might be seasonal, once again, the same applies. but then you have the intention of actually bringing it up again. So what I would suggest then is using the available tools like Terraform to go and script your environment.
You shut down as though you’re shutting down permanently, and then the non-tangibles, like the VM settings, only require a single script being run two weeks before you start up again.
If you just want to take a look at shutting your cloud down for various costs:
A) Every provider has tools to do this; and
B) There are 3rd party tools that allow you automate this process to the point where you can spin it up and shut it down from a device as simple as a smart watch.
You need to understand the scenario that you’re trying to shut down for.
A permanent shut down, you need to always worry about the data, the data can’t just disappear, there’s rules and laws around that.
It actually comes down to your operations. You should be operating like you’re ready to shut down and treat it as a very rapid Disaster Recovery exercise.
If you want to shut down due to a seasonal impact or something similar, then add that step of I’ve got all my configurations as code.
So my infrastructure’s built as code and I’ve just got the data in the background, sitting there waiting to be ingested again.
And if you want to do just cost saving exercises, look at the tools that the cloud provider provides and stick to those tools.
Otherwise, look at third parties and consultancies, or you’re going to be paying someone to sit and shut things down for you every night. Which are costs that add up very quickly, in which case you might your infrastructure can be kept running.
Feeling Familiar With The Cloud?
Want more inside information on the cloud and its capabilities?
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