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Is that old cloud instance running?

Perhaps youve heard this around the office. It shouldnt be too surprising: anyone whos ever tried to load the Amazon EC2 console has quickly found how difficult it is to keep a handle on everything that is running. Only one region gets displayed at a time, which makes it common for admins to be surprised when the bill comes at the end of the month. In todays distributed world, it not only makes sense for different instances to be running in different geographical regions, but its encouraged from an availability perspective.

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On top of this multi-region setup, many organizations are moving to a multi-cloud strategy as well. Many executives are stressing to their operations teams that its important to run systems in both Azure and AWS. This provides extreme levels of reliability, but also complicates the day-to-day management of cloud instances.

So is that old cloud instance running?

You may get a chuckle out of the idea that IT administrators can lose servers, but it happens more frequently than we like to admit. If you only ever log in to US-East1, then you might forget that your dev team that lives in San Francisco was using US-West2 as their main development environment. Or perhaps you set up a second cloud environment to make sure your apps all work properly, but forgot to shut them down prior to going back to your main cloud.

Thats where a single-view dashboard can provide administrators with unprecedented visibility into their cloud accounts. This is a huge benefit that leads to cost savings right off the bat, as the cloud servers running that you forgot about or thought you turned off can be seen in a single pane of glass. Knowledge is power: now that you know it exists, you can turn it off. You also get an easy view into how your environment changes over time, so youll be aware if instances get spun up in various regions.

This level of visibility also has a freeing effect, as it can lead you to utilizing more regions without fear of losing instances. Many folks know they should be distributed geographically, but dont want to deal with the headache of keeping track of the sprawl. By tracking all of your regions and accounts in one easy-to-use view, you can start to fully benefit from cloud computing without wasting money on unused resources.

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Is That Old Cloud Instance Running? How Visibility Saves Money in the Cloud - Business 2 Community