Category: Cloud FinOps

Cloud FinOps FAQs

Post author By Karthick Perumal
Post date March 12, 2024

Get All the Answers

Cloud has become an integral component for successful business operations. However, alongside the benefits of cloud computing come the complexities of managing costs effectively. Enter Cloud FinOps, a discipline aimed at optimizing cloud spending while maximizing value. It continues to be one of the top cloud priorities in 2024 and the coming years. As organizations embark on this new journey, numerous questions arise regarding FinOps practices. This article covers a few with responses from our cloud finops experts themselves Kathick Perumal, Product Engineering Head and Mukesh Kumar, our Product Architect who holds profound experience in tackling cloud finops challenges of our clients.

1. What is Cloud FinOps?

Cloud FinOps is a practise which enables organization to maximize the value derived from their cloud resources spending.

2. What does Cloud FinOps do?

It offers multiple benefits to the cloud businesses. In a nutshell, it enables developers, operations, finance, and other business teams in comprehending and managing costs associated with cloud computing.
Suggested Reading: What are the benefits of cloud finops?

3. Why is Cloud FinOps important?

Cloud finops is vital for various reasons. It is crucial in solving some of the key challenges like,

There is a lack of accountability and control over the cloud spending.
Absence of continuous cloud resource tracking and monitoring
Failure to implement optimal practices for cost reduction.
Delay in problem identification and rectification costs huge.
Loss of control over cloud asset growth as the organisation scale up.
Difficulty in finding the best cloud resource alternatives.

4. How Cloud Service Providers help in Cloud Cost Optimization?

CSPs do give us a lot of options through which we can realize considerable savings.

Pay-as-You-Go Pricing: Cloud services often follow a pay-as-you-go model, allowing users to pay only for the resources they consume. This flexibility helps in cost optimization by avoiding upfront costs for unused resources.
Reserved Instances: Cloud providers offer reserved instances or commitments, where users can commit to a specific number of resources for a term, often at a discounted rate compared to on-demand pricing.
Spot Instances: Some cloud providers offer spot instances, allowing users to bid for unused compute capacity at a lower cost. This can be cost-effective for certain workloads that are flexible in their resource requirements.
Auto-Scaling: Cloud platforms allow for automatic scaling of resources based on demand. This ensures that you only use and pay for the resources you need when you need them, helping to optimize costs.
Resource Monitoring and Management Tools: Cloud providers offer tools that allow users to monitor resource usage and costs in real-time. This visibility helps in identifying areas for optimization and cost savings.
Discounts and Incentive Programs: Cloud providers often provide discounts for long-term commitments, volume usage, or specific use cases. Additionally, they may offer incentive programs to encourage cost-conscious usage.
Cost Management Services: Cloud providers offer cost management and budgeting tools that help users set, track, and manage their spending. Alerts and reports assist in keeping costs within predefined budgets.
Global Presence: Cloud providers have a global network of data centers. Utilizing resources in regions where costs are lower or taking advantage of content delivery networks (CDNs) can result in cost savings.

5. What are the easiest ways to control cloud costs?

While there are many, enterprises miss to leverage some of the simple options available in hand,

Wherever possible, use reserved instances rather than pay-as-you-go instances.
Remove unused or idle resources by continuously monitoring the resources all the time.
Optimize the application architecture to maximize data ingress and egress. Ingress is free. But egress is chargeable based on the size of the data you transfer.

6. Is it possible to save money without compromising the performance?

Yes, a lot of cost savings can be achieved by continuous monitoring and optimizing your cloud usage for orphans and unused resources. Beyond reducing you can even witness improving performance levels.

In CloudCADI, we monitor for Orphan/Unused Disk, Public IP Address, load balancer, SQL servers, NAT gateway, Application Gateway, etc.

7. What are the trivial things that impact largely in cloud costs?

Well, there are many. They might seem small at the early stages of cloud adoption. The team’s focus will be more on the project, deliverables, and deadlines forgetting the fact that every resource they install/download start accumulating the bills either they use it to its fullest or not.

Examples are, leaving unused resources that are not actively contributing to operations, inefficient resource sizing, neglecting to properly tag and organize resources for cost allocation, etc. These can bring impacts like, wasting money on excessive resources or experiencing performance issues due to insufficient resources, difficulties in tracking and attributing costs to specific projects or departments.

8. What are the possible ways to overcome cloud costs?

Setting up notifications for out-of-the-ordinary spending or usage habits.
Optimizing cloud resource allocation for maximum efficiency.
Making use of rightsizing approaches to match resources to actual demands.

You can rely on CloudCADI for all these needs. It does a phenomenal job.

9. Finops Consultants or FinOps Tools?

The choice between FinOps consultants and FinOps tools depends on various factors, including the specific needs and circumstances of the client’s organization.

FinOps consultants bring in-depth knowledge and expertise in FinOps practices to the organisation. They can provide personalized approach by taking a holistic view of the organization needs.

While on the other hand, Finops tools brings multiple advantages, like automating certain aspects of cloud cost management, make the process less human error prone, continuous monitoring, detailed break downs and reports.

10. Why FinOps is an organization wide practice?

We always insist this to our customers. FinOps is not constrained to the cloud engineering division, it’s an organization wide cross functional collaborative practice. It involves all three hierarchies – engineering team, operations team, and finance team. Every stakeholder requires a solid information on the cloud usage, performance, and cost in their terms. So that they become accountable of their choices and can map it to their relevant goals.

Do you have any more questions? Write to us: Contact Amadis Experts

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Tags Cloud Assets Management, CLOUD COST MANAGEMENT, CLOUD COST OPTIMIZATION, CLOUD COST OPTIMIZATION TOOLS, CLOUD FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT, CLOUD FINOPS, CLOUD FINOPS TOOLS

Cloud Cost Optimization Cloud FinOps

Why CloudCADI Should Be Your Cloud FinOps Tool?

Post author By Sindhupriya Dhanabalan
Post date June 9, 2023

Cloud FinOps products & tools are essential for enterprises to effectively manage, optimize, and control their cloud costs. They offer a plethora of benefits allowing organizations to make data-driven decisions, achieve cost savings, and maximize the value of their cloud investments. Let’s dig deep into some of its benefits.

What Are The Benefits of Cloud FinOps Tools?

1. Cost Optimization: They tell you where you can save.

Cloud FinOps tools help enterprises optimize their cloud spending by providing insights into usage patterns, identifying cost-saving opportunities, and enabling effective cost-management strategies. They allow to monitor and control cloud costs, avoid unnecessary expenses, and make informed decisions to optimize their cloud investments.

2. Financial Visibility: They break down your cloud spend.

Cloud FinOps tools offer financial visibility by providing detailed reports and analytics on cloud costs. They help enterprises understand their cloud spending across different services, business units, projects, or regions. This visibility enables better budgeting, forecasting, and cost allocation, empowering organizations to track and manage their cloud financials effectively.

3. Resource Efficiency: They show ways to leverage your cloud resources.

Cloud FinOps tools enable enterprises to optimize resource allocation and utilization. They help identify underutilized or idle resources, recommend rightsizing opportunities, and enable efficient scaling and provisioning of cloud resources. By optimizing resource usage, enterprises can eliminate wasteful spending and achieve better overall resource efficiency.

4. Cost Accountability: They turn cloud stakeholders financially accountable.

Cloud FinOps tools facilitate cost accountability by providing cost visibility to different stakeholders within the enterprise. They enable cost tracking and chargeback/showback mechanisms, allowing business units or teams to understand and manage their cloud spending. This promotes transparency, accountability, and cost-conscious decision-making throughout the organization.

5. Collaboration and Communication: They provide cross-functional collaboration.

Cloud FinOps tools foster collaboration between finance, IT, and business teams. They provide a common platform for discussions, cost analysis, and decision-making related to cloud spending.

6. Scalability and Growth: They align your financial goals with technical objectives.

Cloud FinOps tools support enterprises in scaling their cloud operations efficiently. As organizations grow and their cloud usage expands, these tools enable proactive cost management and scalability planning. They provide insights into the cost implications of scaling, help forecast future costs, and enable enterprises to align their cloud spending with business growth objectives.

Why Should You Choose CloudCADI?

CloudCADI (Cognitive & Actionable Data Insights) is an all-in-one cloud cost optimization tool that can supercharge your cloud cost management. From granular cost breakdowns to actionable recommendations, our tool provides the ultimate financial visibility and control.

While CloudCADI offers a wide range of benefits, we highlight three need-of-the-hour features that solved most of our client’s cost optimization challenges.

CloudCADI has Externalized Business Rule Engine (EBRE):

An externalized business rule engine (EBRE) refers to a software component or system that separates business rules from application code and stores them in an external repository or engine. It allows business rules to be managed independently of the application logic, enabling greater flexibility, maintainability, and agility in decision-making processes.

Some of its benefits include:

Business-User Friendly: An EBRE is designed to be accessible to business users and subject matter experts who have domain knowledge but may not possess programming skills. It provides a user-friendly interface to manage rules, empowering non-technical users to participate in the rule development process.
Agility and Flexibility: With an EBRE, CloudCADI allows business rules to be modified and updated independently of the underlying application logic. This promotes agility and flexibility in adapting to changing business requirements without the need for code changes or application redeployment.
Separation of Concerns: Externalizing business rules improves maintainability, modularity, and readability by allowing developers to focus on application logic while business experts concentrate on defining and managing the rules. It in turn promotes collaboration and reduces the time required to implement rule changes.
Target-driven approach: Business users have the option to set utilization targets and derive actionable insights & recommendations for execution. Like the traditional data center optimization models, this target-driven optimization using CloudCADI EBRE provides the technology team with the much-needed, end-state visualization before implementing the changes.

CloudCADI is Non-intrusive:

When an enterprise wishes to start cloud cost optimization with CloudCADI, all they need to give us is just a reader-level role for their cloud subscription. Our product starts its work right from there through the cloud service provider’s logs. Unlike other major cloud finops tools in the market, CloudCADI is agentless, (do not load agents), and exports any of your confidential data outside your secured networks.

A few benefits include:

Security: CloudCADI ensures the security and privacy of your cloud cost data. It sits within your cloud environment without any third-party external agents that require access to your sensitive cloud information.
Minimized disruption: CloudCADI identifies cost-saving opportunities without requiring significant changes to your existing infrastructure or application architecture. It analyses your cloud usage and spending patterns, providing recommendations to optimize costs while minimizing disruption.
Easy Implementation: CloudCADI can be implemented with minimal effort and configuration. It typically integrates with your existing cloud environment seamlessly. Within 2 weeks you can start optimizing your cloud infrastructure.

CloudCADI is Cloud-native:

CloudCADI is a cloud-native solution leveraging the cloud-native components for its deployment and functioning.

Some of its benefits are:

No additional compute: CloudCADI utilizes customers’ existing cloud services for its necessary data extraction required for optimization. Thus differs from many cloud finops tools in the market that writes separate scripts on the client instances consuming significant compute power and associated costs.
Agility: CloudCADI embraces the principles of agility, allowing for faster deployment and iteration cycles. They leverage containerization and monolithic architecture, enabling rapid updates and feature releases, thereby improving time-to-market.

Role-Based Access:

Not all cloud stakeholders require all cloud financials. While the business heads focus on the expenses overview for a defined period, cloud engineers will look for a granular breakdown that can lead them to the ultimate cause. CloudCADI has the flexibility to restrict or grant view permissions for users.

Self-Service Analytics / Dashboard View: You can grant or restrict user permissions to view cost summary, service category, performance, and/or highly utilized resources as per the user. For example, resources’ performance and highly utilized resources chart alone could be given to engineers who handle restructuring.

Advisor recommendations: This is our key feature that allows users to start optimizing almost immediately with multiple choices. This makes it more valuable to engineers rather than the CIOs. You can make this read-only access for them, so they focus on what is required.

Settings: You even have the facility to restrict CloudCADI usage settings like the cloud account information, tags, and members according to the user. This allows you to protect your secret cloud account credentials, usage, etc. intra-organization.

CloudCADI Integrates with Service Now:

Enterprises use ServiceNow ticketing for various reasons like centralized ticketing management, streamlined ticket workflows, self-service capabilities, and enhanced reporting.

If you are a large enterprise with multiple disconnected teams handling ‘n’ a number of cloud resources for diverse set deliverables and using ServiceNow as your ticketing software, you are in safe hands.

CloudCADI can be easily integrated with your ServiceNow in just a few seconds. Beyond the visualization of your cloud environment, this paves the way to take action on the optimization recommendations. With this, the cloud cost optimization becomes seamless eliminating manual error-prone communications and efforts.

Start Now!

Are you excited about the above features? We have just listed a few and there are many more to experience. Reach out to us for a demo today. Start optimizing your cloud investment without compromising your performance.

SPEND RIGHT on cloud.

Tags CLOUD COST MANAGEMENT, CLOUD COST OPTIMIZATION TOOLS, CLOUD FINOPS TOOLS

Cloud Cost Optimization Cloud FinOps

Kubernetes Cost Optimization Best Practices – Part 1

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:

A 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, the 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.

3. Affinity

Pod/Node Affinity helps in influencing the pod scheduling that helps in resource optimization and, in turn the cost. Even though the scheduler does its job of equally spreading pods across the nodes, for some special cases like, when an application requires a specific hardware or licensing constraints, we can use Node Affinity to schedule pods onto specific nodes. This in turn avoids over provisioning of expensive resources and kubernetes cost management.

It is not done. Looking for more optimal ways to cut down Kubernetes costs? Read our next blog here : Kubernetes Cost Optimization Best Practices – Part 2

Kubernetes Cost management can turn simple when you use CloudCADI. Try a demo today.

SPEND RIGHT on Cloud with CloudCADI.

Tags CLOUD COST MANAGEMENT, controlling kubernetes costs, kubernetes, kubernetes cluster management, kubernetes cost management, kubernetes cost optimization, Kubernetes management

Cloud Cost Optimization Cloud FinOps

List of Best Cloud Cost Optimization Tools 2024

Post author By Sindhupriya Dhanabalan
Post date September 26, 2022

Enterprises globally prefer to use cloud cost optimization tools to maximize their cloud investments. While certain organizations use native tools provided by AWS, GCP, and Azure others tend to opt for homegrown tools or third-party tools. Few even mix up to reduce cloud spending. According to a report from report of the FinOps Foundation, enterprises use an average of 3.7 tools for their cloud cost optimization process. Let’s see in this article a few of the best cloud cost optimization tools you can evaluate for 2024.

1. CloudCADI

CloudCADI is a one suite cloud cost optimization tool offered by Amadis Technologies Inc., USA. It got you covered for all your cloud FinOps needs. It makes the day of cloud practitioners easy with an effective dashboard, and precise reports with which allows show back to the lowest possible unit and start restructuring almost immediately. This tool comes with need-of-the-hour features like,

Cloud Native – It leverages the power of cloud features like scalability, elasticity, etc. facilitating faster deployment

Externalized Business Rule Engine – It allows the user to play around with multiple cloud assets recommendations, so the user has the flexibility to choose as per their infrastructure and project needs.

Non-intrusive nature – It stays within your cloud environment eliminating the need to worry about the security breach and third-party intrusion

Role-based data access – Customizing the cost optimization data visibility based on roles (Engineering team, Finance team, etc.) is simple with Cloud CADI.

Showback- It allows you to drill down and find the root cause of the cost overruns to take immediate actions.

End-to-End Automation- It facilitates the seamless integration of ticketing tools like ServiceNow.

Alerts- It has customizable reporting& alert capabilities to give visibility over IaaS/SaaS/PaaS services and assets, resulting in a better understanding of activities in the cloud

Clients – Johnson & Johnson, Unisys, GSM Outdoors, Exafluence, DigiKey

Founded – 2019

HQ: New Jersey, USA

Other Tools

‘Finops Foundation‘ is a non-profit organization that was established to promote best practices, standards, and education in the emerging field of cloud financial management, recently released a report on “Different Usage Types of FinOps Tools” (ref. figure below). Let’s see some of the tools mentioned,

2. AWS Cost Explorer

A native product of AWS cloud service provider helps to visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time. Few key features are,

- Monthly costs report – AWS Cost Explorer includes a default report that helps you visualize the costs and usage associated with your top five cost-accruing AWS services and gives you a detailed breakdown of all services in the table view.

- Hourly & resource level granularity – AWS Cost Explorer helps you visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over a daily or monthly granularity.

- Savings plan reports – It provides you with two reports to help analyse your Savings Plans purchases and saving opportunities – Savings Plans utilization report and Savings Plans coverage report.

- Reservation reports – The reservation utilization report visualizes your aggregate reservation utilization and allows you to set a custom reservation utilization target. The reservation coverage report visualizes your overall reservation coverage and allows you to set a custom reservation coverage target.

Few Clients – Verisk, Airbnb, Arista

Founded – 2014

HQ: Seattle, Washington, United States.

3. Cloudability (Apptio)

Cloudability, a product of Apptio, ingests, normalizes, and structures cloud billing and usage data from across your public cloud ecosystem to actively manage spending and consumption to continuously improve the unit economics of cloud service. Few key features are,

- Budgets & forecasting – Establish team budgets, accurately forecast, and track cloud spend

- Cloud cost summary Dashboard – Correlate cloud spend to business value to make cloud investment decisions with confidence

- Rightsizing recommendations- Stay informed of costs and act on anomalies and rightsizing opportunities by team, service, or project

- True Cost Explorer – Accurately allocate all costs, including containers and support charges, to ensure a full chargeback of cloud costs to the business

Few Clients: ibotta, Agero, OLX Group, seek

Founded: 2011

HQ: Portland, Oregon, United States

Subsidiaries: Datahero, Inc., Digtal Mines Ltd., RipFrog, Inc.

4. Cloud Health

Cloud Health is a product of VMWare, which delivers intelligent insights that help you optimize costs, improve governance, and strengthen your cloud security posture. Some of its few key capabilities are,

- Resource organization & management – Cloud Health FlexOrgs helps in aligning cloud data with the business offering greater control of user access, sharing, etc.

- Reporting & Dashboards- Filter and refine out-of-the-box graphical and tabular reports to correlate datasets for analysis against your business objectives.

- Budget management and forecasting – Configure budgets to visualize your expected costs for the year in advance and compare it with actual spending as the year progresses.

Few Clients – Experian, Salesforce, Harman, Scholastic

Founded – 2012

HQ: Boston, Massachusetts, United States

5. Datadog

Datadog Cloud Cost Management delivers cost data where engineers work and with resource level context like CPU, memory, and requests easily scoped to their services and applications so that they can take action and spend effectively. Some of its key features,

Instantly allocate your cloud costs across cloud providers and by product, service, and team, with out of the box and user defined tags
Identify the biggest cost changes and use powerful queries to drill down to resource-level spend
Make cost decisions with confidence with built in cost validation that ensures high data accuracy

A few Clients: Samsung, Siemens, Deloitte, Sony, Comcast, Maersk

HQ: NewYork, US

Founded: 2010

6. Kubecost

If optimizing your expenses on Kubernetes is your ultimate goal, Kubecost can be a right fit.

Kubecost provides real-time cost visibility and insights for teams using Kubernetes, helping you continuously reduce your cloud costs. Few key features are,

Cost allocation – Breakdown costs by any Kubernetes concepts, including deployment, service, namespace label, and more.
Optimization insights – Receive dynamic recommendations for reducing spend without sacrificing performance.
Alerts & governance – Quickly catch cost overruns and infrastructure outage risks before they become a problem with real-time notifications

A few Clients – Datagen, Camunda, Under Armour

HQ: San Francisco, CA, US.

Founded: 2019

7. Azure Cost Management

Azure Cost Management is a native tool from Microsoft Azure cloud service helps to leverage the cloud environment and implement financial governance in your organization. Few key features are,

- Cost analysis – Track resource usage and manage cloud costs across all your clouds with a single, unified view while accessing rich operational and financial insights to make informed decisions.

- Drive organizational accountability – Implement governance policies for effective enterprise cloud cost management and increase accountability with cost allocation and chargebacks.

- Optimise cloud efficiency – Improve the return on your cloud investment by using continuous cost optimization and industry best practices.

- Manage Azure and AWS together – Manage costs across Azure and AWS from a single location. Get insights based on data from both clouds to simplify your cost management processes.

Few Clients: Schneider Electric, over 70% of Azure’s enterprise clients use Azure Cost Management

HQ: Redmond, United States

Pricing: Free for Azure

8. Google Cost Management

A cloud-native tool from GCP aids in organizing cloud resources, taking control of your cloud costs, optimizing spending and savings. Key features go like this,

- Resource hierarchy and access controls – Structure and organize your resource hierarchy for fine-grained management and cost allocation using organizations, folders, projects, and labels.

- Reports, dashboards, budgets, and alerts – Get at-a-glance views of your current cost trends and forecasts with intuitive reports in the cloud console and set budgets to closely monitor your costs and alert stakeholders through email or Pub/Sub when exceeding defined budget thresholds.

- Recommendations – View intelligent recommendations for optimizing your costs and usage.

A few Clients – Etsy, Vendasta

HQ: Mountain View, California, United States

9. CloudChekr

CloudCheckr is now part of Spot (by NetApp) brings visibility and intelligence to help you lower costs, maintain security and compliance, and optimize resources. Features are,

- Cost visualization – Experience the power of the industry’s easiest-to-create reports and share dashboards to get insight into key trends and what’s driving spend.

- True intelligence – Understand why companies save 30% or more with smarter purchase recommendations and with hundreds of best practice checks to identify specific savings opportunities.

- Single view – Align SecOps, InfoSec, DevOps and FinOps by ensuring strong security posture in the same platform that cost, resources and services are managed.

- Customizable tools – Its customizable tools help to differentiate your service offerings and improve profitability.

A few Clients – Accenture, Logitech, Lumen

HQ: Mountain View, California, United States

Founded: 2011

10. Cloud Custodian

It is a opensource cloud security, governance and management platform from Capital One that allows user to easily define rules to enable a well-managed cloud infrastructure, that’s both secure and cost optimized. Custodian supports managing AWS, Azure, and GCP public cloud environments. Significant features are,

- Real-time compliance – Besides just providing reports of issues, Custodian can actively enforce the security policies you define.

- Cost Management – Setup off-hours to save you money, by turning-off resources when they’re not being used. Garbage collects unused resources by looking into utilization metrics.

- Run anywhere – Custodian can be run locally on an instance, or Serverless in AWS Lambda.

- Simple DSL – Use Custodian to build complex workflows or simple queries, millions of policies can be constructed using our easy-to-read DSL.

HQ: Virginia United States

Founded: 2016

11. Pyracloud

A product of SoftwareOne is a single platform to transact software licenses and cloud subscriptions, view your entire on-premises and cloud software estate, while leveraging a combined view of your technology platforms and commercial agreements to make informed business decisions. It offers benefits like,

- Visibility and accountability of software usage and spend

- Identify software cost saving opportunities

- Automation to drive operational efficiency

- Insights for rightsizing and reducing compliance risks

A few Clients: DreBler, PRMG

HQ: Stans, Switzerland

Founded: 2016

12. Flexera

With Flexera you can get visibility into cloud usage and costs for all your cloud accounts. You can evaluate and report on your most cost-effective regions and instance sizes, and dive deep into public and private cloud costs by application, category, business unit, cost center, department, or team.

Features,

- Complete cost visibility – Get a complete picture of public and private cloud costs including compute, network, and storage with combined billing data and detailed usage information

- Cost allocation by center/team – Tag cloud resources to track cloud budget and spend and enable invoice reconciliation and allocation to cost centers/teams with specific markups and markdowns on cloud costs

- Cost anomalies alerting – Automatically calculated spend anomalies reporting gives you insight and the culprits behind spikes and reduction in cloud spending by a variety of variables

- Robust cost monitoring – Analyze, forecast, budget, and report on cloud infrastructure costs by an assortment of factors, including cloud provider, account, and region

A few Clients: Walmart, Toyota, Shell

HQ: Itasca, Ilinois, United States

Founded: 1988

Summary

While there are abundant of tools available in the market, not every tool is suitable for everyone. Every business is different and so as their cloud needs. Adopt the right cloud FinOps/cloud cost optimization tool and start leveraging your cloud environment now. If your organization needs are unique and looking for a customizable cloud cost optimization tool with complete control of data, try CloudCADI.

Tags Best Cloud FinOps Tools 2024, CLOUD COST OPTIMIZATION TOOLS, CLOUD FINOPS, CLOUD FINOPS TOOLS, List of Cloud FinOps Tools, Top Cloud FinOps Tools 2024

Cloud Cost Optimization Cloud FinOps Cloud Resources Management

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 what are common challenges in implementing the same and how to overcome them in this article.

Common Cloud Cost Optimization Challenges

While cloud cost optimization offer remarkable benefits, there are number of challenges that organization might face when trying to achieve the optimal savings. To mention a few,

Lack of visibility into cloud costs : Without proper monitoring and analysis, it can be challenging to identify areas where cost optimization is required.
Lack of expertise: Many organizations do not have dedicated cloud finops professionals or resources for managing cloud expenses.
Lack of continuous monitoring: Without consistent monitoring, organizations might miss the opportunities for savings at the right time.

Now let’s see one by one how to overcome these below,

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: Analyze your cloud

Optimizing starts with analyzing. Review your organization’s cloud usage and spending patterns. This helps to identify the areas that needs restructuring or elimination and develop a targeted cost optimization strategy. You can either do this with a dedicated FinOps team or an effective cloud finops solution like CloudCADI.

Step 5: Retire the unused

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 6: Leverage services from your CSPs

Cloud Service Providers(CSPs) provide various cost saving options to facilitate clients in saving their cloud investments. Savings plans, discount on bulk scaling, reserved instances are a few options to make use of and realize significant cost savings.

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.

Keep optimizing. CloudCADI is with you!

Find this useful? Read Part 2 of Cloud Cost Optimization Steps here.

Tags CLOUD COST MANAGEMENT, Cloud Cost Optimization Practices, Cloud Cost Optimization Steps, cloud economics, CLOUD FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT, CLOUD FINOPS, FINOPS

1. What is Cloud FinOps?

2. What does Cloud FinOps do?

3. Why is Cloud FinOps important?

4. How Cloud Service Providers help in Cloud Cost Optimization?

5. What are the easiest ways to control cloud costs?

6. Is it possible to save money without compromising the performance?

7. What are the trivial things that impact largely in cloud costs?

8. What are the possible ways to overcome cloud costs?

9. Finops Consultants or FinOps Tools?

10. Why FinOps is an organization wide practice?

Authors

What Are The Benefits of Cloud FinOps Tools?

Why Should You Choose CloudCADI?

Challenges in Kubernetes Cost Optimization

Charged as a whole:

Showback and chargeback – Near Impossible:

Multi-cloud adoption:

Dynamic Autoscaling:

Kubernetes Cost Optimization Best Practices

Guaranteed:

Burstable:

Best-Effort:

2. ResourceQuotas & LimitRange

3. Affinity

1. CloudCADI

Other Tools

2. AWS Cost Explorer

3. Cloudability (Apptio)

4. Cloud Health

5. Datadog

6. Kubecost

7. Azure Cost Management

8. Google Cost Management

9. CloudChekr

10. Cloud Custodian

11. Pyracloud

12. Flexera

Summary

Common Cloud Cost Optimization Challenges

Step 1: Arm them

Step 2: Herd them

Step 3: Pivot on center

Step 4: Analyze your cloud

Step 5: Retire the unused

Step 6: Leverage services from your CSPs

Amadis Technologies Inc.

Amadis Technologies Pvt. Ltd.​

Amadis Technologies Pvt. Ltd.​​

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