Watching the cloud

Once your cloud environment has started to expand and more hardware resources are deployed, cloud operators should find ways to optimize costs. There are niche use cases, such as optimizing the placement of VMs (VMs migrate between hosts in case of imbalance detection).

The lack of tooling and efficient processes to conduct a resource optimization exercise presents a big challenge to private cloud operators. Traditionally, OpenStack administrators needed to manually grab historical metrics on resource usage, analyze them in regular sprints, and make decisions based on the collected data. However, manual processing in a large OpenStack deployment can be error prone. To automate such a process, the OpenStack community has come up with an evolving incubated project code named Watcher. The main objective of the Watcher project is to enable new ways for cloud operators to reduce the cloud’s Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Watcher is designed to monitor, analyze...