Tag: 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

Authors

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

Kubernetes Cost Optimization – Best Practices (Part 2)

Post author By Sindhupriya Dhanabalan
Post date October 4, 2023

As businesses continue to embrace Kubernetes for its scalability and agility, cost management becomes increasingly critical. We understand that managing cloud costs can be complex, especially in large and dynamic containerized environments. That’s why we’re here to provide you with practical insights and actionable tips to take control of your Kubernetes spending. In our previous blog on Kubernetes Cost Optimization Best Practices – Part 1, we covered the common cost optimization challenges and a few solutions. Let’s see a few more,

Taints & Tolerances

In Kubernetes, “taints” and “tolerations” are mechanisms that can be used strategically to optimize costs by efficiently managing the allocation of workloads to nodes within your cluster. They act as filters in the Kubernetes world. Some of its uses in optimization are,

Efficient Utilization:

Nodes can be ‘tainted’ based on their utilization or capacity, such as CPU or memory usage. This allows you to mark nodes that are underutilized or overutilized. Whereas pods that are designed to scale horizontally can have ‘tolerations’ for nodes with low utilization. When additional resources are needed, more pods can be scheduled on those nodes to efficiently utilize available resources without provisioning new nodes.

Cost Optimization:

You can create custom ‘taints’ to represent various cost-related attributes, such as GPU availability, network bandwidth, or specific hardware types. Also pods can be configured with ‘tolerations’ that align with your custom cost-based policies. This ensures that workloads are deployed on nodes that match their requirements while considering cost factors.

Example:
Let’s say, your web application includes a background processing component that handles non-critical tasks like generating reports or processing non-urgent user requests. These tasks can tolerate occasional interruptions or delays without impacting the overall user experience.

For this case, Taint the nodes that are running on spot instances to indicate their cost-effectiveness but potential for interruptions.

Result: This taint marks these nodes as suitable for running cost-sensitive workloads.

To schedule less critical pods on spot instance nodes, define tolerations as below,

Result: These tolerations allow the pods to be scheduled on nodes with the “spot-instance” taint.

If a spot instance is reclaimed by the cloud provider, Kubernetes will automatically reschedule these pods on other available nodes, maintaining the desired level of service while optimizing costs.

Sleep Mode

You don’t need all workloads or resources to run 24/7. Especially during non-business hours and weekends. CPU, memory, or storage resources rack up the bills when they are left idle. Putting them into sleep mode with Cronjobs during non-business hours or HPA efficiently scales down the environment when not in use and scales up automatically when needed.

Example: If you want to put your Dev environment to ‘sleep mode’, here’s the code to scale them down at 5.00 P.M. everyday.

Node Pools

Node pools involves grouping nodes with similar characteristics like CPU, memory, etc. This helps in efficient resource management which in turn drives Kubernetes cost optimization. Different cloud providers offer a wide range of VM instance types optimized for various use cases. When you explore the offerings of your chosen cloud provider GCP, AWS, Azure, etc. you can identify instance types that align with your workload requirements. Pay attention to factors like CPU, memory, storage, network performance, and cost.

Kubernetes Cost Monitoring Tools

At Amadis as we always insist, spending is not a bottleneck as long as you SPEND RIGHT on your cloud resources. Spending right starts from analyzing your Kubernetes environment which is possible with Kubernetes cost monitoring tools.

CloudCADI simplifies your complex Kubernetes cost optimization process in a few clicks. Some of its key features are,

Pod-level showback: From your native cloud providers’ bills, you can get the charges of the clusters overall. Whereas in CloudCADI, you have the flexibility to drill down the charges at a lowest possible unit level – pod.

Node resizing: CloudCADI never stops with the Kubernetes cost and utilization overview. Furthermore, it gives intelligent recommendations on how to alter your resources with choices and savings opportunities. Cloud administrators can simply leverage these options rather than manually evaluating the options.

By implementing these cost optimization tricks and regularly reviewing your Kubernetes environment for inefficiencies, you can effectively manage your infrastructure costs while ensuring optimal performance and resource utilization.

SPEND RIGHT on cloud with CloudCADI today.

Tags CLOUD FINOPS, kubernetes cost optimization, Kubernetes Costs

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 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 7: 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 CloudCADI that helps you to track, monitor, and restructure based on intelligent recommendations.

Step 8: Use Showback

Cost overages can occur from various sources. Overview of the cloud expenditure can only tell us how much we are wasting. Success of cloud cost optimization doesn’t stop right there. Identifying the source and rectifying the issue is the right way but it 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.

CloudCADI can show you pod level details of cost anomalies.

Step 9: 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 10: 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 11: 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.

Step 12: 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.

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 Cost Optimization Practices, Cloud Cost Optimization Steps, CLOUD FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT, CLOUD FINOPS, FINOPS

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

Cloud Cost Optimization Cloud FinOps

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”

Cloud FinOps benefits have been trending in the cloud industry for quite some time now. 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.

What is Cloud FinOps?

Cloud FinOps – “Cloud Financial Operations”, is an organization wide practice that brings financial visibility and realization of an organization’s cloud spending. So every cloud stakeholder becomes financially accountable of their cloud resource choices that aligns technology investments effectively to business goals. Cloud FinOps offers a plethora of benefits other than this. Let’s see in this article in detail why is it quintessential.

Check out this short video to understand what is cloud finops.

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. Brings 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

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 process

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 CloudCADI 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.

Other Added Benefits of Cloud FinOps

6. Drives Cost Optimization

Introducing cloud finops as a practice, drives cloud cost optimization throughout the organization. Rather than scaling up the VMs or EC2 or any machines based on its availability, they now choose based on the business needs. This in turn ensure every penny spent on cloud is leveraged.

7. Ensures alignment with business goals

Adopting cloud finops ensures the allocation and utilization of cloud resources are in harmony with overall business goals and priorities. This ensures that the technology infrastructure fosters rather than hinders the path towards company’s vision to success.

8. Helps Risk Mitigation

Cloud FinOps practice helps to mitigate financial risks associated with the use of cloud services. As we monitor and manage costs closely like tracking expenses, analyzing usage patterns, identifying areas for cost optimization, businesses can proactively identify the potential financial risks such as budget overruns, inefficient resource allocation and uncontrolled expenses.

9. Fosters Continuous Improvement

Cloud environment is dynamic with changing business requirements and evolving technology requirements. Iterative optimization is necessary where organizations regularly review their cloud spending patterns, identify areas for enhancement and implement changes for sustainable business. FinOps effectively accommodates this and assures operational efficiency.

10. Emphasize budget control

Cloud FinOps practices emphasizes the importance of setting and controlling budgets for cloud spending. By establishing clear budgeting guidelines and thresholds, organisations can proactively manage and control their cloud expenses. This in turn allows to maintain financial discipline.

Whom can you trust for your Cloud FinOps?

“Newfound Understanding and Growth Through CloudCADI”

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

CloudCADI 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 CloudCADI’s features.

Non-Intrusive

CloudCADI resides within the client’s public cloud environment without any third-party agents, eliminating the security breach threats.

Other Key Features,

Externalized Business Rule Engine: It allows users to play around as per their unique requirements.
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.
Role based analytics: CloudCADI facilitates role-based visibility to dashboard.
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

CloudCADI 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 CloudCADI features and call our experts for pricing. We will show you how one solution can enable you to leverage your entire cloud environment.

Tags Cloud Assets Management, CLOUD COST OPTIMIZATION, cloud economics, cloud expenses, CLOUD FINOPS, cloud finops benefits, what is cloud finops