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Cloud Visibility and Governance are critical to reducing cloud costs to the optimal level. Here’s how this is accomplished:
Discover and optimize brownfields
We inventory existing instances and synchronize every 5 minutes. Convert discovered instances to managed instances to enable enhanced automation, logging, and granular analytics.
Analyse metrics and compare costs
The Cloud Cost Analytics Engine compares utilization and costs across clouds to help make decisions on where workloads should be provisioned.
View cloud cost comparisons and use cloud cost analytics to understand use by user, group, cloud, and tenant. Filter by region, tag, instance type, and more.
Implement cost optimization guidance
View and execute rightsizing recommendations for resource and cost optimization. This is done by monitoring the CPU, RAM, and Storage to recommend actions for sizing, power state, and reserved instances in public clouds.
Manage hybrid cloud prices and plans
Create on-prem price-plans just like public cloud including granular prices for CPU, memory, cores, storage, platform, and software. Support multiple currencies and price adjustments for mark-up.
Automatically synchronize all public cloud pricing nightly including allocation of EA and CSP pricing in some public clouds.
Track summary costs and budgets
Projected cloud cost trends are visible for all clouds plus detailed metrics are available on cloud summary pages.
Scope budgets to accounts, clouds, tenants, and users then scoped to different periods and intervals by month, quarter, or year.
Analyse and allocate cloud cost data
Leverage built-in reports, export data, or use the billing API to integrate with 3rd party tools for cross-charge and show back.
Automatically track usage for all instances across all clouds and will pull actual public cloud invoice data to enable a single cross-cloud system of record.
Cloud Governance
Regarding cost management, understanding past and current cloud consumption is part of the puzzle. The other part is being able to proactively manage cloud spend with governance.
Budgets
One of the biggest concerns most organizations have is overspending without any bounds. Budgets helps solve this problem by allowing administrators to define a cap on the maximum amount that can be spent by a group, user, role or cloud.
Provisioning Approvals
The benefit of self-service is the ability to request resources as needed. This can be problematic without any guardrails if users request extremely expensive resources. Provisioning approval policies solve this problem by requiring an approval if the request meets certain criteria.
Tag Enforcement
Tagging of cloud resources is a best practice for ensuring that workloads have identifying metadata associated with them. Tags for cost center, project or department tags are a common best practice for cost visibility purposes. Proper tagging of all workloads is a challenging task for organizations with a large cloud footprint. Tag policies allow administrators to define tags that must be applied on provisioned resources within scope.
Power Scheduling
The billing of cloud instances is based on resources being consumed on a per minute or hourly basis. This is beneficial for testing and development to spin up resources for quick iteration and then destroy the resource or shut it down. Shutting down an instance when not in use can help reduce the monthly cloud bill but remembering to turn instances on and off manually is difficult. Power schedules allow administrators to define a schedule for when an instance is powered on or off.
Resource Expiration
Deploying a cloud resource can be done at the push of a button but ensuring that they are destroyed when no longer needed is a challenge. This often results in many orphaned resources that cost money. Expiration policies allow administrators to define how many days a resource can be leased before it is destroyed. This is especially useful in development and sandbox environments where users are typically granted greater access and control.
Conclusion
We looked at the Cloud Visibility & Governance features within the Cloud Management Platform. This set of features provides a holistic approach for reducing an organization’s cloud spend.