Cloud Cost Control and optimization

IT and Operations are expected to implement companywide public cloud cost management and find ways to catch unruly spending and rein them in. Gartner estimates that, “organizations that have done little or no cloud cost optimization may be overspending by 70% or more. Without a formal action plan, organizations will increasingly waste money, sign inappropriate contracts and obtain substandard service.” (Gartner, your 90-Day Action Plan to Control Public Cloud Spend, Feb 2019) There are major hurdles on the way to controlling and minimizing cloud expenses. In most organizations, cloud spend is generated by different teams that maintain several accounts.

To get an aggregated view of the entire organization’s cloud utilization, one would naturally turn to the cloud provider’s billing and utilization reports, and then attempt to extract actionable information to form cost management processes and policies. Cloud provider billing reports contain a granular breakdown of regional infrastructure, instance types, networking services, and usage costs.

 

Recommendations

Technical professionals in charge of IT operations and cloud management should:

 

1. Make cloud consumers accountable for what they spend. Provide them with the resources to create forecasts, monitor costs and pursue optimization opportunities.
2. Build cost-tracking foundations using both provider-native hierarchies and tags. Use them to organize resources around principles such as applications, departments, or cost centers.
3. Drive cost optimization by monitoring utilization and capacity metrics. Schedule and right size allocation-based services. Leverage programmatic discounts. Modernize applications to make use of provider managed services when these are more cost-effective.
4. Deploy the cloud provider’s native tools to manage spending. Augment them with third-party tools.
5. Maximize Discounts on Reserved instance (RI) to reduce cost.

 

From principles to practice

Optimizing cloud costs isn’t a checklist, it’s a mindset; you’ll have the best results if you think strategically and establish strong processes to help you stay on track. Direct Experts Cloud Architect perform cloud FinOps processes, deploy cost optimization methods and assist in controlling the cost in cloud environments by the company needs.

Our FinOps Service provides a PowerBI dashboard with a set of reports that can be easily filtered to show the exact resources and costs within a given timeframe, region, resource group, resource type, or subscription.

Key reporting options include:

• Cost Management: Overview of Azure costs by account, service (infrastructure, storage, databases, networking, applications), as well as trends over time
• Asset Management. A report showing costs and consumption levels for individual resources across regions, accounts, subscriptions, and date ranges.
• Resource Tracker. Report showing the number and type of new resources deployed each month enabling you to quickly spot and investigate unusual changes in Azure deployments.
• Optimization Recommendations. Outline reporting of potential savings that could be made via a combination of strategies such as Reserved Instances and Hybrid Benefit