Right-Sizing and Autoscaling: Paying for What You Use

You Are Probably Paying for Idle

The on-premise habit is to size for the worst case and leave it running. Carried into the cloud, that habit means paying — every hour — for capacity you use for a few hours a month.

Two Levers

Right-sizing matches a resource to its actual measured usage rather than a cautious guess; the data is in your own metrics. Autoscaling goes further, adding and removing capacity automatically as demand changes, so you pay for the peak only while it is happening.

Both need a little tuning and monitoring, and not every workload suits autoscaling. But for variable demand, the difference between a fixed guess and elastic capacity is often a large, recurring saving.