Cloud 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.
