Cloud computing consumption is often compared to electricity usage because both provide resources on demand and offer so-called “pay as you go” models. Unlike cloud computing, though, you don’t buy electricity by chunks, guessing the right size in advance, and the bill doesn’t double when you use just a bit more power. 

Cloud computing has been a major technological step for both its ease of deployment and its cost efficiency. One could call it the most disruptive technology of the last decade.

In this time of continual change, the cloud itself is now ripe for disruption. That’s because a significant amount of cloud resources are wasted, revealing inefficiency in this oh-so-efficient technology. This particularly applies to cloud computing resources and storage. Many companies don’t do routine checks to see how much capacity they are using, so in most cases, they are overpaying for resources that never get used.

When you deploy a particular instance from a cloud vendor, you’re given a wide range of virtual machine (VM) sizes from which to choose. For example, here are some of the options from AWS. The same approach is used by Azure, Google Cloud (both of which Jelastic has a technical integration with), Digital Ocean and many others.

The first challenge here is to find the size that is enough for a good performance during an average load and has extra breathing room for scaling inside the machine you use. The second challenge arises when your current VM becomes too little for the project needs and you have to graduate to a higher-powered VM that will usually be twice as large.

The problem is that you’re likely always over-allocating beyond what you need, especially during low-use or idle times. As a result, you’re still paying for these reserved but unused computing resources. When you start growing your infrastructure horizontally — adding more VMs — you compound the problem by having multiple VMs with unused capacity. Wasted resources increase proportionally and, as a result, the efficiency declines even further.