Managing Costs | Modernizing RHEL Management 07

This one is a little more abstract than the hands-on episodes, but it hits something every team cares about: cost. John walked through the subscription service, which shows what you have purchased against what you are actually using, and resource optimization, which compares your real utilization to cloud instance sizes so you can right-size and save money. Both are about giving you information to make good decisions.

A few things worth carrying away from this one:

• System purpose attributes make the subscription view useful. Tagging systems as production, development, or by SLA is what lets you filter usage meaningfully instead of staring at a big “unspecified” bucket.
• Look into simple content access now. John made the point that SCA is going to become the standard, so learning to track your consumption with the subscription service is worth doing before it is mandatory.
• Resource optimization caught my idle two-XL red-handed. Our miniseries system was idling over 99 percent of the time, and Insights recommended a much smaller t3 instance. Setup is basically download a playbook and run it, then wait a day for data.

Neither of these services has a remediation button, and that is by design. Their job is to hand you the numbers and let you decide.