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Your cloud setup is like a ship on the ocean. To ensure a safe journey, it needs regular maintenance and care. As your business grows and your tech stack becomes more complex, it’s easy for small inefficiencies to creep into your cloud environment which can drive up costs, waste resources, and make it harder to effectively scale.

DigitalOcean is proud to offer hands-on support to our customers to help them optimize their cloud setup, which includes free architecture reviews with expert solutions engineers, and tips to avoid inefficiencies in your cloud setup. If you’re a DigitalOcean customer, you can request your own architecture review now. To explore actionable insights on your own, watch our recent Sail to Success webinar, where we shared practical tips on improving your cloud architecture, including ways to boost performance, enhance security, and save on costs.

How cloud architecture reviews can benefit you

Regular cloud architecture reviews are beneficial to businesses of all sizes. Here are a few reasons we recommend examining your cloud setup regularly:

• They support business growth: As your business evolves, your cloud infrastructure must evolve with it. A cloud architecture review helps you align your current environment with your business goals, helping to ensure your cloud is positioned to support where you are today, where you’re heading, and the outcomes you need to achieve.

• They improve performance and security: Regular reviews can find hidden problems that can slow you down or make you less secure. Downtime isn’t just inconvenient, it’s costly. A strong, resilient cloud architecture helps you avoid downtime and keeps your business running smoothly, no matter what comes your way.

• They help you save on costs: Cloud reviews can help you make sure your setup is running as cost-efficiently as possible and that you’re getting your money’s worth.

Tips to boost cloud performance and security

Optimizing cloud performance and security is about delivering faster user experiences, protecting sensitive data, and avoiding waste. Whether you’re scaling your app or managing costs, a well-tuned cloud setup gives you speed, stability, and peace of mind. Here are five things you can check to make your cloud faster, more reliable and better protected:

1. Audit your virtual machines and Kubernetes nodes: Many businesses use more virtual machines or Kubernetes nodes than they need. This wastes money. Choose the right virtual machines and Kubernetes node pools to make sure they match how much you’re using. If you find machines that aren’t being used much, make them smaller or move workloads to a smaller instance.

2. Use load balancers and autoscaling: Traffic to your business can change quickly. If you have too much infrastructure, you waste money. If you have too little, your app will run poorly. Autoscaling adjusts your infrastructure based on traffic. This way, you don’t pay for resources you don’t need, and your app runs well.

3. Streamline networking with VPCs: Virtual private clouds (VPCs) can make internal communication faster and cheaper. VPCs also improve security by keeping your traffic away from the public internet. Set up VPCs for internal services that talk to each other a lot. This reduces delay and helps protect your internal resources.

4. Monitor usage and set up alerts: Even with a good setup, problems will happen. Alerts can warn you before small issues become big headaches. Use alerts to track things like CPU usage, memory usage, and data transfers. You can also set up alerts for billing to warn you about unexpected costs.

5. Back up smarter: Losing data or taking a long time to recover can hurt your business. Have a good backup plan. Back up your databases and file systems regularly. Automate the backup process and test your restores to make sure they work.

Tips to save money and grow efficiently

Here are five more things you can do to save money and grow your business:

1. Consolidate and optimize storage: Unused storage costs money. Check your storage usage regularly to avoid waste. Delete old snapshots and unused disks to free up resources.

2. Use managed services: Running your own databases can take time and introduce errors. Managed services can handle scaling, security, and uptime for you, helping to save you time and money. Migrate any self-hosted databases to managed databases offered by your cloud provider—we recommend DigitalOcean. ;)

3. Automate deployments: Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) can reduce errors and simplify rollbacks. Infrastructure as code makes your environment easy to reproduce and build on. Use tools like Terraform and GitHub actions to automate your infrastructure and deployments.

4. Review data costs: Egress data costs can add up, especially if you use a lot of media or APIs. Find ways to reduce unnecessary outbound traffic. Use CDNs to cache content closer to where your users are.

5. Do a monthly cost vs. performance review: Make time each month to review your cloud bill and performance metrics to help you make sure you’re spending money where it matters most. Track your spending and performance to make informed decisions.

How DigitalOcean experts help: A real-world example

Similar to many DigitalOcean customers, a mid-sized software company wanted to serve customers globally with low delay and high performance. They also wanted to make sure their app and database were reliable. They used a containerized deployment and wanted a CI/CD workflow. Our DigitalOcean team knew exactly how to help. Here’s their optimized cloud architecture following our review discussions:

To meet the company’s particular needs, DigitalOcean cloud infrastructure experts suggested the following:

• Global load balancer: Directs traffic to the closest available region. Regional Internal Load Balancers distribute traffic within each region.

• Managed Kubernetes: Provides a fully managed control plane with autoscaling.

• Managed Database: Offers a primary and standby node for high availability.

• Container registry: Stores Docker images for automated pipelines.

• VPC peering: Secures connections between the app and database.

By following these suggestions, the customer created a more reliable, secure, and cost-effective cloud setup. They were able to create an architecture diagram that helped visualize their infrastructure and share it with their team to build a common understanding. Like a captain charting a course, they used this clarity to make informed changes, optimizing their setup to catch the winds of today’s business demands and stay steady on course for future growth.

Optimize your cloud to empower your business

To successfully journey across the ocean of challenges awaiting your business, you need a cloud setup that helps and doesn’t hurt. Staying proactive with regular reviews of your cloud setup can keep your business sailing smoothly. These tips provide a solid starting point for navigating common challenges. But every journey is different, and sometimes it helps to have an experienced guide by your side. DigitalOcean’s cloud experts can help assess your infrastructure with your unique goals in mind, charting a course to better performance and cost savings.

Ready to take your cloud to the next level? Book a free cloud review session with DigitalOcean’s experts. They can help you understand how to set up or review your cloud architecture to support your business growth.