Ruchi RoyCloud sprawl on OpenStack slows teams and inflates costs. From oversized VMs to abandoned volumes, here’s how Atmosphere brings control, cleanup, and cost efficiency back to OpenStack.
Cloud sprawl often starts small. One oversized VM here, an idle volume there. But it doesn’t stay small for long. Forgotten resources, unused IPs, and underutilized Kubernetes clusters quietly consume capacity and budget. Multiply that across tenants and projects, and the impact becomes hard to ignore. Infrastructure teams end up spending more time cleaning up than scaling up.
This isn’t inevitable. It’s a platform design problem. The lack of built-in guardrails, real-time visibility, and lifecycle automation allows sprawl to flourish. Atmosphere addresses this directly by giving operators the tools to control and prevent it at every layer.
Preventing Overprovisioning at the Source
One of the root causes of sprawl is overprovisioning. When users don’t have the right options or data, they fall back to defaulting to large instance types or leaving environments running longer than needed. Atmosphere fixes this by giving operators control over flavor definitions, so instance sizes can be tuned to workload patterns.
Through OpenStack’s quota system, resource allocations for compute, storage, and networking are enforced across projects and tenants. Stratometrics, Atmosphere’s usage service, captures millisecond-level data across VMs, Kubernetes clusters, and storage, helping teams spot oversized, idle, or abandoned resources before they balloon into waste.
Restoring Visibility with Unified Control
Sprawl accelerates when teams work in silos. Separate VM and Kubernetes deployments, fragmented access control, and no centralized monitoring make it nearly impossible to see the full picture. Atmosphere consolidates all of this into one control plane.
Whether launching a virtual machine with Nova or deploying a Kubernetes cluster via Magnum, every action passes through the same identity and access management stack (powered by Keycloak). Tagging enables operators to categorize resources by team, project, or environment, making reporting and clean-up easier. With unified logging and monitoring, there are fewer blind spots.
Automating Cleanup and Day-2 Ops
Sprawl sometimes is about what gets forgotten. Atmosphere supports automated cleanup workflows that identify and remove orphaned volumes, unused IPs, and abandoned VMs based on policies set by operators.
Integrated observability, using Prometheus, Grafana, and centralized logging, gives operators a continuous view into consumption patterns, health metrics, and potential anomalies. Combined with alerting systems, this reduces the manual effort needed for routine maintenance and troubleshooting.
Elastic Infrastructure, Not Always-On Waste
Idle infrastructure is one of the biggest contributors to cloud sprawl. Environments that are always on (even when not in use) drive up costs and resource usage. Atmosphere introduces elasticity across both virtual machines and Kubernetes clusters.
Magnum supports Kubernetes auto-scaling, while Nova enables live migration of VM workloads to consolidate usage. These features allow teams to match infrastructure to actual demand. Ceph-backed storage and observability tools help identify consolidation opportunities, and in on-premise or hosted scenarios, these efficiencies reduce energy consumption and hardware strain.
Usage-Based Billing and Internal Chargebacks
In the absence of accurate billing, resource usage can spiral. Atmosphere’s millisecond-accurate usage tracking changes that. Teams see what they’re actually consuming, across compute, storage, and bandwidth.
In hosted editions, this drives fair billing. In on-premise deployments, it enables internal chargebacks that align infrastructure consumption with accountability. This level of granularity promotes more intentional provisioning and helps prevent overuse before it starts.
Governance and Policy Enforcement
Cloud sprawl can’t be solved without governance. Atmosphere allows operators to define and enforce lifecycle policies at the infrastructure level. This includes expiry policies for volumes, alerting thresholds for idle resources, and reclamation of unused IPs.
Using Infrastructure-as-Code through Heat templates, teams deploy resources with consistent naming conventions, quota enforcement, and RBAC baked in. Auditing capabilities track every change, from who launched a VM to when a cluster was scaled, making compliance and operational oversight straightforward.
Making Multi-Modal Infrastructure Sustainable
Many OpenStack environments now run both virtual machines and containers. This adds flexibility but also increases the risk of duplication and fragmentation. Atmosphere brings both models under one management layer.
Ceph-backed block storage supports both Nova volumes and Kubernetes persistent volumes through CSI drivers. Networking is handled by Neutron, providing IP management and tenant isolation across both types of workloads. Whether it’s a bare-metal bound ML job or a stateless API, operators manage them with one set of policies and observability tooling.
Long-Term Sustainability Through Better Defaults
Solving cloud sprawl once isn’t the goal. Atmosphere focuses on defaults that encourage long-term sustainability. That includes automated upgrades, self-healing Kubernetes clusters, live migration support, and capacity forecasting tools built into the platform.
These features reduce the operational burden of managing sprawl manually and allow infrastructure teams to proactively manage usage over time.
Towards a Sprawl-less Future
Cloud sprawl doesn’t always look like a failure. Sometimes it looks like small inefficiencies no one has time to fix. But over time, those inefficiencies accumulate across environments, teams, and workloads. They make infrastructure harder to troubleshoot, more expensive to operate, and slower to scale.
Atmosphere is built to solve that before it snowballs. It gives operators the tools to see what’s running, enforce what should be running, and retire what isn’t. No custom scripts, no patchwork monitoring setups. Just sane defaults, unified policy enforcement, and a usage layer that actually reflects reality.
If your team is spending more time deleting things than delivering, or if scaling up feels like opening the door to more clutter, it’s probably time to rethink how your OpenStack environment is managed.
Book a free consultation with us. See how Atmosphere can help you eliminate sprawl at the source and build an environment that stays clean even as you grow.