A study conducted by Cast AI has found that companies only use around 13 percent of the CPUs they provision, and 20 percent of memory, on average.
The analysis – from a company that provides a Kubernetes cost optimization platform – is based on 4,000 clusters running on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure between January 1 and December 31, 2023.
The clusters included in the report are those of 50 CPUs or more. Little difference between cloud providers was found – with AWS and Azure both averaging utilization rates of 11 percent, though Google was slightly better, with 17 percent.
Memory utilization split between the big three cloud providers was 18 percent for Google, 20 percent for AWS, and 22 percent for Azure.
The utilization rate was slightly improved for larger clusters – with those containing 1,000 or more CPUs averaging 17 percent utilization.
Cast AI has suggested that the main reasons behind this are customers allocating more computing resources than necessary, customers reluctant to use “Spot Instances” due to perceived instability, and an under usage of custom instance sizes where you can select the CPU and memory ratio.
Read more: datacenterdynamics.com
