This is the first technical newsletter of 2020 and we would like to take the opportunity to wish everyone a great year! Below is the news on the improvements to the Workflow scheduler that we have made in recent weeks, always in response to customer requests.

[MultiCloud] National holidays

We now support the suspension of appointments when it is a national holiday. The typical use case is to not start the servers when it’s a holiday, because in business terms it’s like the weekend. With this appointment, Cloud8 will suspend the schedule and document in the audit that it was not executed as it was a national holiday.

[AWS] Upgrade/downgrade EBS disk types

This is a little-known resource, but it can generate big savings. You can change the EBS type of any disk between “magnetic”, “general purpose SSD” and “SSD with provisioned IOPS”. The difference in costs between them is large and a change in times of low demand brings a significant cost reduction.For example, a magnetic disk in Virginia costs $0.05 per GB + IOs while an SSD costs $0.10 per GB (practically double). Provisioned IOPS costs US$0.125 + US$0.065 per IOPS (i.e. 1000 IOPS is US$65.00 more).Use cases:

• unused disks -> convert to magnetic
• disks from stopped servers -> convert to magnetic
• SSD -> convert to magnetic at low demand times
• Provisioned IOPS -> study whether it is worth lowering the number of provisioned IOPS depending on usage/time

[AWS] Suporte a DNS/Route53

Back up and restore DNS zones. Schedule your DNS backup as often as necessary. A benign side effect is that once the backup is done, you can recreate the DNS zone in another AWS account as if you were ‘migrating’ the DNS. Fast and without a headache.

[Google Cloud] Upgrade/downgrade instances

Already supported for AWS and Azure, upgrading and downgrading is a way to reduce costs when it is necessary to keep the server on, but demand at certain times such as early mornings and weekends is lower. The idea is to reduce the number of colors and memory at these times to gain up to 50% cost savings.In the case of Google Cloud, we support changing types and changing custom types, specifying number of colors and memories. This way, you can only change what needs to be reduced/increased.

[Google Cloud] Upgrade / downgrade em Cloud SQL

In the same way that we support instances, we now support databases. Remembering that the cost of a database is much higher than pure instances and therefore the cost reduction can be even greater.

[Azure] Upgrade/Downgrade para bases SQL Server

Do you have any questions or do you have a suggestion? We’d love to hear from you!