I want to know how to characterize my workloads in the cloud. With that, I should be able to find systems both over-provisioned and resource starved to aid in right-sizing and capacity planning. CloudForms by Red Hat can do these at the system level, which is where you would most likely take any actions, but I want to see if there’s any additional value in understanding at the aggregate level. 
We’ll work backwards for the impatient. I found 7 unique workload types by creating clusters of cpu, mem, disk, and network use through k-means of the short-term data from CloudForms (see the RGB/Gray graph nearby). The cluster numbers are arbitrary, but ordered by median cpu usage from least to most.
From left to right, rough characterizations of the clusters are:
- idle
- light use, memory driven
- light use, cpu driven
- moderate use
- moderate-high everything
- high cpu, moderate mem, high disk
- cpu bound, very high memory
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