Category: Cloud Cost Optimization

Cloud Modernization – Best Practices

Post author By Sindhupriya Dhanabalan
Post date May 22, 2023

In today’s digital age, businesses are constantly looking for ways to improve their operations and remain competitive in the market. The cloud is one of the most significant advancements in technology that has revolutionized how businesses operate. Cloud computing has transformed the way companies store, manage, and access data, providing a more flexible and scalable approach to IT infrastructure. However, as technology advances, old practices become outdated, and it is essential to consider cloud modernization practices which in turn saves cloud expenses.

Definition: What is cloud modernization?

Cloud modernization refers to the process of updating existing cloud infrastructure to leverage new capabilities and ensure that it aligns with the latest industry standards. With the ever-increasing demand for agility, scalability, and security, cloud modernization can help businesses stay ahead of the curve. Let’s see some strategies for cloud modernization.

Use Serverless Computing

Serverless computing is another trend that has gained momentum in recent years. With serverless computing, businesses can run applications without having to manage servers or infrastructure. This approach can help businesses achieve greater agility and scalability, as they only pay for the resources they use.

Serverless platforms, such as AWS Lambda or Azure Functions, do not require any upfront costs or long-term commitments. You only pay for the actual execution time and the number of invocations. This cost structure is particularly beneficial for sporadic workloads or applications with unpredictable usage patterns, as you are not locked into paying for unused resources. This reduces operational overhead and associated costs for system admins or DevOps teams.

Optimize Resource Utilization

Finally, businesses can optimize their infrastructure costs by optimizing their resource utilization. By monitoring their cloud infrastructure usage, businesses can identify areas where they can reduce their resource utilization, such as idle instances or oversized resources. This approach can help businesses reduce their infrastructure costs by only paying for the resources they need. Cloud FinOps tools like CloudCADI effectively do this and come with more exciting features like the one-panel dashboard, externalized business rule engine, and non-intrusive deployment.

Microsoft recommends three modernization practices for maximized cloud results.

Application modernization

Application modernization is leveraging technological advancements for upgrading legacy applications to improve their functionality, performance, scalability, security, and user experience to suit fast-paced business needs.

Different approaches to consider are,

Re-arrange: Lift and shift your legacy code to modern technologies without significant changes to the code.

Re-architect: Redesign the application leveraging microservices or containerization approaches. These technologies enable more efficient resource utilization by allowing applications to scale up or down based on demand. With auto-scaling capabilities, organizations can dynamically allocate resources as required, minimizing idle resources and associated costs.

Re-build: Build an entirely new application using modern frameworks, and languages from scratch while retaining the core business logic and functionality.

Re-place: Replace the legacy application with commercially available SaaS solutions saving extensive development efforts. Retiring the legacy applications reduces the costs associated with maintaining and supporting outdated infrastructure and licenses, while also benefiting from the cost-effective, scalable, and managed services provided by the cloud platform.

Process Modernization

Bringing DevOps methodology into processes is the best modernization approach as it brings together planning, development, delivery, and operations. Microsoft Azure comes with a lot of DevOps tools like Azure Repos, Azure Pipelines, Azure Boards, etc. that can effectively help developers to speed up their processes when coupled with the Agile framework.

Database Modernization

Microsoft recommends Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) adoption for cloud database modernization. Examples are, Azure SQL, Open-source SQL & NoSQL. Modernizing databases in the cloud allows organizations to take advantage of cloud-based infrastructure and eliminates the investment in expensive servers, storage systems, and networking equipment, organizations can leverage scalable and cost-effective cloud resources, paying only for what they use.

Conclusion

Cloud modernization is essential for businesses looking to stay ahead of the curve in today’s digital age. Adopting the above-mentioned best practices can achieve greater agility, scalability, and flexibility while reducing costs. With the right approach to cloud modernization, businesses can unlock the full potential of the cloud and stay ahead of the competition. Undoubtedly, it should be a continuous process for success at all levels.

Spend Right On Cloud.

Tags CLOUD COST MANAGEMENT, Cloud Modernization Practices, Serverless Computing

Cloud Cost Optimization

How to plan your cloud budget for 2023 efficiently? – Cloud Cost Optimization

Post author By Sindhupriya Dhanabalan
Post date March 28, 2023

“41.4% of cloud leaders are increasing their cloud-based services and products – Google Cloud Brand Pulse Q4 2022 survey.”

Before we unravel the areas where our budgets drained last year, we are already in the mid of February 2023. The macroeconomic downturn has gone rigorous in recent months and is threateningly widespread. The sooner the enterprises figure out their business sustainability areas, the safer their cash flow. Cloud expenses occupy a significant portion of any fast-paced digitally transforming enterprises’ overall budget. This article will show you the ways to optimize your cloud budgets for days to come.

1. Watch out for the trends!

“Hyperscalers will face a period of rising costs and lower revenue growth” – Canalys.

Public cloud service providers like Azure, AWS, GCP, etc. are expected to hike their prices percentage to compensate for the current inflation ramifications. If you are a cloud-native or a cloud-dependent business, ensure your team planned the 2023 cloud budget considering a 20-30% price hike assumption.

2. Stay focused on business goals.

In response to worldwide inflation, if you think reducing your cloud resources count might control your cloud expenses, you are in the wrong direction!

Understand the business purpose before you touch any cloud resource. For example, if you are forecasting a 10 -15% increase in your flagship product/service Q1 sales that uses VMs, trimming down the VMs count might land your profits downfall.

3. Educate every stakeholder.

Cloud cost management is a continuous process involving finance, operations, and business teams. Certain enterprises are still in the migration phase. It is vital to bring financial prudence among every team member involved in the process.

Example: If one of your cloud engineers has scaled out Kubernetes cluster resources during an app dev stage and left it as such in the production stage even after a lot of unwanted functionalities are purged, it would compound the cloud bills. Educating each cloud practitioner before adopting and updating them at periodic intervals on how they are accounting for the bills is crucial.

4. Historical Data is Gold

Nothing tells us better than the past. Bundle up all your previous year’s cloud cost, and utilization data from your cloud bills. You can take the help of your cloud service provider’s native data analytics tools or third-party tools like Cloud CADI. You can get the cost trends for a defined period. By observing the cost spikes and valleys we could find the department, time, and resource responsible for what percentage of cloud budgets.

For example, if a project’s cloud resource utilization is at its peak during business hours and less or none during the festival/holidays. These patterns could help predict the cloud budget for 2023 accordingly.

5. Collaboration serves the purpose.

Success is a collaborative process. We cannot blame the finance team every time there is a cloud budget overrun. Get a cost estimate from every team for the following year. Understand the fact that it is difficult for a team leader to predict a budget as they are afraid of the wrong forecast and becoming answerable to the management. Educate them that it is practical and 10-30% variance is acceptable. So, we get a number to start.

Don’t forget – Cloud Cost Optimization is the Key!

“CIOs Still Waiting for Cloud Investments to Pay Off” – Wall Street Journal

Gartner forecasts worldwide public cloud spending to cross $592 billion in 2023. While the expenses on the cloud constantly rocketing, ROI is still under question for most enterprises. Cloud technology seemed like an economical option with huge benefits like scalability, agility, flexibility, etc. during the crisis. The pay-as-you-go model from cloud service providers further eased the organizations to migrate their on-prem workloads at a faster pace in the last few years. Cloud practitioners started enjoying the luxury of cloud resources without worrying about their impact on the cloud budget. Rightsizing, cloud tagging, discounts, etc. are inevitably helpful to overall business growth.

Remember, how smart and strong may be your cloud budget, if not utilized on the right resources at the right time and in the right manner, you’ll end in negative ROI and a cloud resource deficit that can harm your end customer.

Spend right on the cloud with CloudCADI and have a blast in 2023!

Tags Cloud Budget, CLOUD COST MANAGEMENT

Cloud Cost Optimization

Kubernetes Cost Optimization Practices

Post author By Sindhupriya Dhanabalan
Post date December 5, 2022

Cloud containers come with the flexibility to lift and shift applications to any environment, cloud or virtual or bare metal without worrying about the virtual OS, hypervisors, etc. Simplified management, paced up delivery and agility compel cloud developers to hail containerization. Kubernetes aka k8s (if you are wondering what k8 means, it’s just a replacement of 8 letters “ubernete”) is a popular open-source containerization platform cloud developers adopt widely. According to a recent report by CNCF, there is a 67% increase in Kubernetes developers worldwide which manifests the popularity.

The sad news is the surge in adoption and usage comes with a compromise in the IT infrastructure budget. Enterprises could be wasting nearly 80% of Kubernetes expenses on unintentional resources that are not helping organizations to hit their goals as planned. Let’s see in this blog what are the challenges and ways to optimize.

Challenges in Kubernetes cost optimization

Charged as a whole: A cluster contains multiple nodes within. Each node will in turn contain a varying number of containers. Every node that is present inside one cluster is not necessarily part of the same application as others. Each node may be handled by 20 different teams for different applications. But the cluster is charged as a whole or clusters together by the cloud service providers. Billing starts right when a container is deployed into a node. The additional cost of $2.4/day is charged for Kubernetes cluster maintenance, software license, disaster recovery, etc.

Showback and chargeback – Near Impossible: These two processes are vital for enterprises to bring financial accountability. (Showback is the process that gives visibility to a business unit’s expenses on cloud resources usage for a particular period but not charged. Whereas chargeback is where the unit is informed as well as charged based on its utilization.) Tagging, which can aid the engineers in cost tracking is not possible in Kubernetes clusters.

Every penny we invest becomes worthy when it checks the list of features/output we planned. When they just stay at the expense side mapped to no production, then the ultimate source for the anomalies should be identified. But it is not as simple as it sounds for Kubernetes clusters. Spotting the team responsible for most of the expenses is daunting as each container may be utilized by different teams in the enterprise working on different deliverables. Each team’s Infrastructure budget and resource cost allocation varies on the other hand.

Multi-cloud adoption: In Gartner’s recent survey, 81% of the respondents stated that they use 2 or more cloud service providers to avail of various benefits like overcoming vendor- lock-in, resource discounts, disaster recovery, etc. Kubernetes clusters will contain workloads from different cloud service providers like AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. which further twists the cost anomalies detection and Kubernetes cost optimization process.

Dynamic Autoscaling: One of the key reasons for cloud engineers to choose the Kubernetes cluster is its autoscaling feature. Depending on the usage demand, Kubernetes scales up or down so the resources suffice the compute requirement during peaks and valleys. Further in horizontal autoscaling, containers scale out which may reach from 2 to 20 within a day. Kubernetes cost optimization turns complicated because of this unpredicted autoscaling.

Kubernetes Cost Optimization Best Practices

Let’s look at the optimal ways to trim the inadvertent expenses.

Quality of Services for Pods (QoS)

Kubernetes cluster offers cloud practitioners the flexibility to set different QoS classes to Pods. Based on this the Pods’ scheduling and removal become easier for cloud practitioners. It is of 3 types – Guaranteed, Burstable, and Best-Effort.

Guaranteed: When cloud engineers need to have a Pod, whose instances are sufficient to handle a highly critical app, they can configure it to be a guaranteed QoS class. So, both the CPU & memory limits and requests are the same and set. As the name suggests it guarantees minimal resources (Requests are the minimum number of resources and limits are the maximum resources it can use)

Burstable: Burstable QoS class is assigned for a Pod when the vCPU or memory limit is more than the requests or not essentially the same. So, when the need arises for a spiked compute requirement, they can be utilized.

Best-Effort: When both the limits and requests are not set, it is classified as a best-effort QoS class. Cloud engineers can avail for non-critical applications.

As we can clearly witness, Best-effort pods are the first choice for removal followed by Burstable and then Guaranteed.

Related reading: How to configure pods and containers?

2. ResourceQuotas & LimitRange

As we saw earlier, the Kubernetes cluster is shared by various teams. There is a possibility that one team may consume most of the Pods leaving other teams scarce. Namespace-level Pod restriction can mitigate this issue (Namespace is a virtual cluster). ResourceQuota is the means through which we can limit Pods’ usage within a Namespace.

Kubernetes administrators create a ResourceQuota for each Namespace. Whenever a user creates or updates a Pod within a Namespace, ResourceQuota system checks if the limits are exceeded, If it is crossing the limits, it returns a “403 FORBIDDEN” error denying the action.

LimitRange is another policy that helps with resource constraints individually. As the name goes limits the range of “limits & requests” within a Namespace.

It is not done. Looking for more optimal ways to cut-down Kubernetes costs? Wait for our next blog!

Spend Right on Cloud with Cloud CADI.

Tags CLOUD COST MANAGEMENT, kubernetes cluster management

Cloud Cost Optimization

Cloud Cost Optimization – Steps to make note of – Part 2

Post author By Sindhupriya Dhanabalan
Post date July 5, 2022

Cloud resource provisioning took a paradigm shift from what it was before 10 years. It is now rapid and agile. Solutions like serverless cloud computing, and Infrastructure as a Code further simplify the scenario. Heavily consumed manual efforts are now redirected to core tasks. Cloud resource provisioning is no more a daunting task, but cloud cost optimization is.

We have discussed cloud cost optimization best practices – Part 1 before, let’s continue with the further steps in this article.

Step 6: Narrow down

Enterprises use multiple tools for cloud cost optimization. They prefer to stick with native cloud service provider tools for better reliability.

Example: Businesses using AWS cloud, can make use of,

AWS Cost Explorer – for managing and visualizing the cloud usage
AWS Cost Anomaly Detection – for detecting cloud spending abnormalities. This utilizes machine learning and statistical algorithms for accurate cost overage detection.
AWS Trusted Advisor- for recommendations on reducing costs, improving security, performance, etc.

Many other native tools are also available like AWS CloudWatch, and AWS Budgets that aid cloud cost optimization. Hovering over multiple tabs for information can complicate cloud practitioners’ decision-making.

Adopt a single solution that can unify all the results under one pane like Cloud CADI that helps you to track, monitor, and restructure based on intelligent recommendations.

Step 7: Chargeback

Cost overages can occur from various sources. Overview of the cloud expenditure can only tell us how much we are wasting. Identifying the root cause requires enormous effort.

Example: In Microsoft Azure, when we create a VM, a public IP address, network security group, and regular network interface is also created. When this VM is found to be unused for a longer period, the team decommission it to save the cloud costs. But if they miss decommissioning the other components (Public IP, Network interface, NSG) it still accounts for the monthly cloud bills.

Cost optimization reports should help us to filter it down and identify the lowest individual unit, the source of unintended spending.

Cloud CADI can show you pod level details of cost anomalies.

Step 8: Map them

Every cloud cost optimization activity is directly coupled with the business benefits. List your business KPIs and benchmarks. Involve a stakeholder from every team like engineering, management, finance, and operations while figuring out KPIs. It’s crucial to map cloud spending with the business value it adds.

Example: Cloud spend per customer, cloud spend per application

This exercise will help you to deeply associate engineering activities with cost and make every stakeholder’s decision financially accountable.

Step 9: Keep in store

When you are aware of the roadmap and confident with the computing demand for the coming days, it’s safe to procure cloud resources well before. Bulk procurement in advance helps management on opting for better offers or discounts from service providers.

Example: Reserved Instances. AWS’ RI can provide up to 72% discount compared to “On-Demand” pricing. It also offers the flexibility to alter families, OS types, and tenancies when Convertible RIs are chosen.

Step 10: Go with the same

Before choosing the cloud service provider audit the internal environment thoroughly. If you have multiple Microsoft applications, it is good to go with Azure which saves integration costs. If there is a need for a short-term compute resource, go with a “pay-as-you-go” pricing model that allows increasing or decreasing compute capacity on-demand and pay for minutes (VMs) or seconds (Container instances). Whereas, for low latency microservices, and big data processing, GCP is a better option.

Final thoughts

The steps stated above are just a few. It is not the end of the cost optimization setup. As we discussed earlier, it is an iterative process that is to be carried out each day.

Does the entire process sound so complicated? It is not when you choose CloudCADI. If you would like to know how? allow us to explain more.

Dial us today!

Tags CLOUD COST MANAGEMENT, CLOUD COST OPTIMIZATION, CLOUD FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT, FINOPS

Cloud Cost Optimization

Cloud cost optimization – Steps to make note of – Part 1

Post author By Sindhupriya Dhanabalan
Post date June 14, 2022

Cloud cost optimization is a practice any organization should adopt to ensure they spend right on the cloud. We have discussed what are the benefits of cloud cost optimization in the past. Let’s see how to plan the same.

Step 1:

Arm them

Every cloud stakeholder should be armed with documents, tutorials, training, guidance, and tools to effectively handle the cloud environment. FinOps products should have the ability to provide graphical representation and reports on cloud usage. Reports should facilitate the stakeholders to dive deep into granular pod level, node level, business unit level, tag level usage, associated cost details, etc.

For example, our product CloudCADI offers reports and trend charts covering parameters like

CPU utilization
Memory
Disk Read
Disk Write
Storage Disk Read
Storage Disk Write
Network Received
Network Sent
Storage

These reports should equip the cloud practitioners with the necessary cost information for effective decisions.

Step 2:

Herd them

One of the major challenges the enterprises face is cross-functional transparency. There may be two app development teams developing two different cloud-native applications without knowing that they both use different monitoring tools that satisfy the same purpose. Procurement teams go with a vendor based on the options provided by the cloud teams and better negotiation with the vendor. They have little or no interest in the usage of the tools by diverse teams.

It is crucial to identify these common requirements and consolidate the resources accordingly.

Step 3:

Pivot on center

Cloud management is a tricky process. Cloud involves the operations team, finance team, cloud engineers, cloud architects, the procurement team, LoB managers, C-suite executives, etc. conveying a different message. Requirements vary from time to time. Organizations should have a centralized cloud cost optimization/FinOps team to mitigate the differences. Any cloud financial decision like buying new licenses, renewal, going hybrid cloud, etc., before reaching the CXO’s office should pass through the FinOps team’s scan.

After a thorough scanning of real needs and expectations, costs and business value mapping should be carried out. Once it is acknowledged, it should reach the decision maker’s table for approval.

Step 4:

Retire the unclaimed

There are resources that secretly weigh the cloud bills. Cloud practitioners set up auto-scaling to ensure enough capacity to face the traffic demands and improved cost management. Let’s consider Azure GPU machines. For high-end remote visualization, ML, and deep learning, GPU category, N-series virtual machines are ideal.

They accommodate low latency, high-throughput network interface for graphics or video-intensive workloads. When the engineers miss out on calculating the right number of nodes and configure in excess, the organization ends up paying for these zombie nodes.

For example,

Azure Instance NC12 with 1XK80 GPU offering 12 vCPUs costs $1.8 per hour. Consider 10 such instances counting 120 vCPUs configured but 5 left unused. At the end of the month, you need to pay $13140 instead of $6570 to Azure midst of no accountable benefits.

It is hard to identify these nodes until you address these in the line items of lengthy cloud bills. For larger organizations handling several applications, identification and mitigation go out of manual efforts. Options left with us are to manually plan and closely watch the configuration process, identify the unclaimed assets, and retire (which is not always feasible) or to go with cloud cost optimization products.

Step 5:

Don’t let it rest

Cloud cost optimization is not a one-time setup to build and leave aside. It is an ongoing process that is closely associated with business productivity and growth. When the organization scale, cloud dependency increases piling up the cloud resource volume to meet the growing demands. The need for faster delivery, customer experience, rapid innovations, and competition foster organizations to less worry about the selection, allocation, tracking, and costs of the cloud workloads. Generally, they lock in with the existing cloud vendors for easier procurement and support.

Organizations tend to lose millions when they miss out on optimizing their new workloads along with the previous. Select a FinOps solution that runs along with your vision, each day dragging everything under one umbrella.

Let’s catch up with Part 2 soon. Keep optimizing. Cloud CADI is with you!

Tags CLOUD COST MANAGEMENT, CLOUD COST OPTIMIZATION, CLOUD FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT, FINOPS

Cloud Cost Optimization

Cloud Tagging – Strategic Practices

Post author By Sindhupriya Dhanabalan
Post date May 27, 2022

Enterprises using public cloud assets need a well-thought public cloud tagging of assets, an inventory model to achieve the highest level of visibility, and utilization, thereby robust mechanisms to ensure minimal wastage. It is vital for all organizations at scale.

“The wider the cloud adoption, the more complex is the cloud cost management”

According to NASSCOM, enterprises are expected to increase their cloud budget by nearly 5-15% CAGR till FY 2025. Selection, allocation, tracking, and monitoring of the cloud resources that seem simple and manual during the initial cloud adoption stages will turn into a headache when cloud assets number multiplied by hundreds.

The Cloud infrastructure management team can make use of “Tagging” and bucket the resources under a tag defining their function in the cloud. Any cloud practitioner can easily call, filter, and organize the resources using their tags.

Even the leading cloud service providers, Microsoft, AWS, and GCP emphasize tagging as the best practice to effectively sort and ally FinOps. We covered the benefits of FinOps in our previous article. Let’s see in this article,

What is Cloud Tagging?
Benefits of Cloud Tagging
Cloud Tagging best practices
Cloud CADI & Cloud Tagging

What is Cloud Tagging?

Cloud tagging is the practice of assigning custom names to cloud resources. Its nomenclature varies from organization to organization based on their teams’ preferences and ease.

Cloud tag comprises two – Key and Value. Key conveys the categories (ex: Environment, Owner) and Value conveys the meta description (ex: Testing, Priya)

Example: Environment: Testing

Key – Environment

Value- Testing

Key and Value can be case-sensitive or insensitive based on the service provider. For example, In AWS, both keys and values are case-sensitive whereas, in Azure, keys are case-insensitive, and values are case-sensitive.

What are the benefits of Cloud Tagging?

Structured resource allocation: Enterprises opt for the multi-cloud environment for improved efficiency. Cloud resources procured from different vendors when contributing to a common project can be tagged under one label. In this way, no cloud resources are left unused.

Streamlined governance: Cloud tagging introduces organized cloud resource management in the organization. Cloud infrastructure management personnel tend to lose control of the track of assets while handling multiple workloads deployed in multiple projects. Cloud tagging helps LOB Managers, CIOs, CTOs, and CFOs easily associate and understand resources with their business value, usage frequency, time of operation, and cost.

Team-specific reports generation: It is crucial to identify which team involves which resource to optimize the cloud utilization. Cloud tagging helps to drill down the cloud usage specific to business units. Reports help the engineering team to assess and alter workloads. This further helps the finance team to understand which team consumes more cloud budget and frame solutions along with the other teams to curb the bills.

Aid automation: Automation in the cloud relieves the burden of the cloud team in handling repetitive tasks. In an agile environment, businesses should be able to scale down or up the storage bandwidth, CPU utilization, or change configurations quickly as the demand rises.

Tags allies in automating the actions like sending notifications to cloud engineers on resources that are idle for a given period; automating the storage for a specific environment(testing); automatic decommissioning or provisioning of bulk resources.

Resource access management: Security is still a debating factor in the cloud. Tag-based access control can alleviate data breaches and ensure the confidentiality of sensitive data transacted over the cloud. For example, we can actively allow the developing team to access only the resource with the tag, environment: dev (user-defined tag).

Traceback the roots: CTOs and CIOs report, that finding the source for cloud spending is a daunting task in cloud infrastructure management according to Economic Times. Tagging helps to find the specific team or resource that is critical and runs for a longer duration eating most of the infrastructure budget. Once it is identified, restructuring, or rebuilding the workload brings down the unintended cloud expenditures.

Cloud Tagging Checklist

Image Source: Pinterest

Even though cloud tagging policies vary from business to business, it’s important to make them standard and globalized across the enterprise. So that it makes sense to every team handling cloud. Defining the rules for cloud tagging during the deployment itself mitigates anomalies in the future.

It’s confidential! – Never include sensitive data to be in the tags.

Why do you need it? – Defining the tagging needs brings better resolution in meta-describing the resources. Stakeholders responsible handling, maintaining, tracking, and improving the tags should collectively define the use cases and name tags accordingly.

Make it speak for itself – Ensure that the naming convention carries all required information like a business unit, region, unique resource identifier, criticality, etc. enough to help the business team, engineering team, and CXOs in locating, and tracking, and cost optimizing the workloads.

Consistency is the Key– Once the tag schema is developed, it is important to stick to it. The person handling the tags should be cautious while defining, improving and update the same in the rules.

Example: Env: nztesting01 is different from Env: testingnz01

Minimum suggested tags– Cloud giants like Azure, GCP, and AWS recommend below as the minimum suggested tags to include for an effective tagging process,

workload name
Data classification
Operations commitment
Operations team
Cost center
Cluster
Version
App id
Disaster recovery
Service class
Start date of a project
Owner name
Business unit

Tag naming limits – Have a watch on the character limits before naming your resources. Key-Value character limits vary based on the CSP you choose. For example, the Key character limit is 1-63 with UTF-8 encoding for GCP whereas, it is 1-128 for AWS resources. Key and values should contain only lowercase letters, numeric characters, underscores, and dashes in GCP. Tag keys and values are case-sensitive in AWS.

Related reading: AWS cloud tagging best practices

CloudCADI & Cloud Tagging

CloudCADI is a one-stop solution for all your FinOps shortfalls. It pulls off all your hidden cloud resources bundling up your cloud bills without any productive output. This financial visibility in the organization makes the employees feel accountable.

CloudCADI makes use of cloud tags to enhance your cloud experience in one go.

Our Recommendations:

1. Cloud practitioners name resources before deploying them into the services or app or any other function. We suggest our clients include at least five fields in their naming convention for easy identification and filtering.

Example,

2. Adding multiple tags to one resource leads to multiple filters to fetch the exact resource utilization and cost data.

Examples,

Owner: Priya (person responsible for the resource)

Platform id: AZR

Region: AU (Australia)

Zone: E (East)

Our flagship product gives you comprehensive reports on the unused, under-utilized, and over-provisioned resources using tags

Cloud CADI – Tag filter screenshot

Tag-based reports are detailed and specific. CloudCADI gives a simple virtual representation for a quicker overview. It allows you to further filter out and point out any resource contributing to the cloud waste.

We can implement custom automation scripts to automate the scale-up, shut down, or any repetitive cloud tasks saving manual labor.

We don’t stop right there. CloudCADI gives “intelligent recommendations” with which you can immediately realize the benefits. Our actionable insights facilitate you with the best alternatives along with the cost savings report to decide immediately.

Start leveraging now.

Tags CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT, CLOUD TAGGING

Cloud Cost Optimization Cost Optimization

Benefits of Cloud FinOps: Top 5 Reasons Why Should You Implement Now

Post author By Sindhupriya Dhanabalan
Post date May 4, 2022

“95% of new digital workload deployment will be cloud-native by 2025 – Gartner”

Pandemic, scalability, flexibility, and gaining a competitive edge are a few reasons which fostered the businesses to lift and shift their infrastructure to the cloud at the earliest.

The Cloud migration team considers various factors while planning the roadmap for the whole migration process. They invest ample time and effort in assessing all the applications, selecting the cloud providers (GCP/Azure/AWS/etc.), checking their security frameworks, compliance, and planning the cloud talent, maintenance, and support.

One key factor that they to miss notice is, if the bills they pay the Cloud Service Providers are only for the cloud assets the business intended and adding value.

Cloud FinOps is a practice that brings financial intelligence and realization of an organization’s cloud spending. This article covers the benefits of Cloud Finops and top reasons why is it quintessential.

What are the benefits of Cloud FinOps?

1. Alleviates uninformed Decisions

“You may be overspending on your cloud!”

Without proper monitoring of cloud resources spending, costly business decisions are less clear and can have negative or suboptimal business impacts. Real-time data insights and granular reports from Cloud FinOps products allow business leaders to

Compare the enterprise cloud resource utilization by time
Understand business units that require more resources
Get service level cloud utilization
Monitor resources that are left idle or underused.

This accommodates LOB managers to optimize their cloud utilization with a clear understanding of the financial implications of their decisions. They take ownership of their cloud usage.

2. Bring Cultural Shift

Every cloud consumer should be able to easily obtain and understand cloud usage and spending data. Unaggregated data can make it extremely difficult for teams to clarify and implement cloud-consuming best practices.

Businesses today are increasingly migrating and spending on cloud resources. While many firms may feel that they are taking the necessary precautions to understand and handle this growth, they may be doing only the bare minimum, leaving resource management teams frustrated.

With the adoption of Cloud FinOps, firms can now optimize their cloud consumption environment in the best conceivable way and create a culture that benefits all cloud-consuming parties.

3. Bring a unified ecosystem

Image Source: igrandbp

There is an invisible complex and frustrating culture split between DevOps, IT, and Finance teams in every enterprise. Request, approval, and intimation processes differ from each other even though they all work towards a common business goal. Certain terms and jargons make no sense to the other team (ex: containers allocation, VMs count). Moreover, the finance team loses its guardrails on cloud infrastructure procurement as the cloud engineering team step into the process.

Cloud FinOps products aid them to stay updated on their cloud cost optimization based on their roles and responsibilities.

Example: Finance team can view the cost data and reports of the resources while the engineering team can view the processer utilization details.

This ensures smooth operations by transforming into a unified, effective, efficient ecosystem.

4. Empower cloud engineers

Engineers prefer cloud to traditional on-premise data centers as it accommodates scalable architecture, flexible design, as and when required storage allocation, etc. Applications that involve complex calculations demand more storage space. They focus more on agile, faster deployment, and bug-free delivery rather than worrying about storage space availability, computing power, and cloud resource availability.

This may lead to unnecessary conflicts between the engineers and the cloud management team. It has the potential to restrict the liberty of engineers to explore and innovate while the cloud management team spends on resources that add no value addition to businesses. Bringing Cloud FinOps into the operations empowers both by having clear visibility and control over the resource utilization.

5. Ensure streamlined progress

Image source: asaecenter

Every business has its own mission and vision. Strategies may change as per the demands and challenges we come across, but the goal is to progress in the right direction amidst all odds. Cloud adoption indeed aids businesses to stay abreast of their competitors. Neglecting the fact of cost-benefit analysis after the migration process, will let the business stay where they are and pay the same bills or more.

Cloud FinOps introduce financial prudence among
the teams. Beyond, Cloud FinOps products like Cloud CADI provide intelligent recommendations on how the cloud engineers can alter; rearrange; rebuild their resources/tools for an optimized cloud environment. This ensures streamlined business progress with contribution from everyone.

Whom can you trust for your Cloud FinOps?

“Newfound Understanding and Growth Through Cloud CADI”

Experience the benefits of Cloud FinOps with CloudCADI, a cloud financial management solution by Amadis Technologies, to partner with you and take hold of your cloud consumption habits while optimizing for future business growth!

Transparency

CloudCADI’s single pane view offers simple, yet information-dense charts and graphs detailing cost, performance, and utilization of all enterprise cloud resources consumed via IaaS / SaaS / PaaS models

Actionable Insights

Cloud CADI offers complete analysis and recommendations for Azure services. Recommendations are made through the analysis of multiple parameters. An average of 6% – 12% monthly savings has been achieved by our clients who have adopted and utilized Cloud CADIs features

Cloud CADI enables cloud consumers to be the best they can be

Cloud Optimization
Performance Efficiency
Operational Excellence
Actionable Insights
Intelligent recommendations

Book a demo to know more about Cloud CADI features and call our experts for pricing. We will show you how one solution can enable you to leverage your entire cloud resources.

2. Stay focused on business goals.

3. Educate every stakeholder.

4. Historical Data is Gold

5. Collaboration serves the purpose.

Don’t forget – Cloud Cost Optimization is the Key!

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Amadis Technologies Inc.

Amadis Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

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2. Stay focused on business goals.

3. Educate every stakeholder.

4. Historical Data is Gold

5. Collaboration serves the purpose.

Don’t forget – Cloud Cost Optimization is the Key!

Step 6: Narrow down

Step 7: Chargeback

Step 8: Map them

Step 9: Keep in store

Step 10: Go with the same

Final thoughts

Step 1:

Step 2:

Step 3:

Step 4:

Step 5:

What is Cloud Tagging?

What are the benefits of Cloud Tagging?

Cloud Tagging Checklist

CloudCADI & Cloud Tagging

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What are the benefits of Cloud FinOps?

1. Alleviates uninformed Decisions

2. Bring Cultural Shift

3. Bring a unified ecosystem

4. Empower cloud engineers

5. Ensure streamlined progress

Whom can you trust for your Cloud FinOps?

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Cloud CADI enables cloud consumers to be the best they can be

Amadis Technologies Inc.

Amadis Technologies Pvt. Ltd.​

Amadis Technologies Pvt. Ltd.​​

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Amadis Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

Amadis Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

Hi there,
What would you like to choose?