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Cloud Cost Optimization Cloud FinOps

Cloud FinOps FAQs

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

Authors

Product Engineering Head
Karthick Perumal - Product Eng. Head
Product Eng. Lead Amadis
Mukesh Kumar - Product Architect
Categories
Cloud Cost Optimization Cloud FinOps

Why CloudCADI Should Be Your Cloud FinOps Tool?

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4.  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:

  1. 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.  
  2. 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.
  3. 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

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Categories
Cloud Cost Optimization Cloud FinOps

List of Best Cloud Cost Optimization Tools 2024

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)