Optimize systems

The Optimize systems pillar helps you maximize efficiency and minimize waste by right-sizing infrastructure, managing costs, monitoring performance, and implementing dynamic scaling strategies that align with actual usage patterns. This pillar helps you achieve optimal resource utilization while maintaining performance and controlling costs across your infrastructure and application portfolios.

When you successfully implement this pillar, you transform from reactive, inefficient resource management to proactive, data-driven optimization. This transformation helps you deliver better performance at lower costs while building the foundation for sustainable growth and scalability. You can respond to changing demands more effectively and allocate resources based on actual business value rather than historical patterns.

Topics in this pillar

This pillar covers two main areas that work together to create a comprehensive system optimization strategy:

• Monitor system health establishes the foundation for understanding system behavior and identifying optimization opportunities, including drift detection, performance metrics, and network monitoring.

• Scale resources covers the strategies and tools for dynamically adjusting resources based on demand, including server scaling and container scaling.

Why this matters

System optimization gives you immediate cost savings and long-term strategic benefits. From a technical perspective, optimization eliminates resource waste and improves performance through better resource allocation and utilization. You can achieve higher throughput with the same infrastructure investment, or maintain current performance levels while reducing infrastructure costs.

The business impact goes far beyond direct cost savings. Optimized systems help you respond more quickly to market demands and competitive pressures. When resources are properly allocated and scaled, you can launch new features and services faster, handle traffic spikes without performance degradation, and maintain consistent user experience during peak usage periods.

Optimization also creates a foundation for data-driven decision making. When you implement comprehensive monitoring and measurement systems, you gain insights into actual usage patterns and performance characteristics. This data helps you make more informed decisions about capacity planning, technology investments, and architectural improvements.

Who needs this

Platform engineers and infrastructure architects will find this pillar essential for designing cost-effective infrastructure platforms that can scale efficiently. These professionals need to understand how to balance performance requirements with cost constraints while building systems that can adapt to changing demands.

DevOps engineers and site reliability engineers are the primary implementers who will use this guidance to build monitoring systems, implement scaling policies, and optimize resource utilization. They need practical guidance on implementing specific optimization practices and integrating them with existing infrastructure and applications.

FinOps teams and cost management professionals will find value in understanding how to implement cost optimization practices and establish cost allocation models. These teams need to work closely with technical teams to ensure that cost optimization does not compromise performance or reliability requirements.

System administrators and operations teams will benefit from understanding how to optimize on-premises infrastructure and integrate with cloud resources effectively. These professionals need guidance on implementing monitoring, scaling, and optimization practices across hybrid environments.

When to focus on this pillar

Focus on this pillar when your organization experiences high infrastructure costs, performance issues, or inefficient resource utilization. This pillar is most valuable when you have growing infrastructure needs, when costs are becoming a concern, or when you need to improve system performance and user experience.

Organizations that have already established basic automation practices will find this pillar particularly valuable, as it builds upon those foundations to achieve cost and performance optimization. It is also essential for organizations scaling their operations or transitioning to cloud-native architectures.

How this fits with the framework

The Optimize Systems pillar builds upon the automation foundation to ensure efficient resource utilization. It provides the economic and performance optimization layer that makes resilient and secure systems cost-effective to operate. Without optimization, you risk overspending on infrastructure or under-provisioning for performance needs.

This pillar relies on the automation practices established in the Define and automate processes pillar. Automated processes create the consistency and reliability necessary for effective optimization. When processes are automated and repeatable, you can systematically measure performance, identify optimization opportunities, and implement changes with confidence.

Optimization practices directly support the Design Resilient Systems pillar by ensuring that redundant and failover systems are cost-effective to operate. You can implement high-availability architectures without excessive cost overhead by optimizing resource utilization and implementing efficient scaling strategies.

The Secure Systems pillar benefits from optimization practices that ensure security controls are implemented efficiently. You can maintain comprehensive security posture while optimizing the performance and cost impact of security measures. Optimization also helps you implement security monitoring and response systems that scale with your infrastructure.