Cloud Optimization Tools = Cloud Cost Control (Part II)
A couple of weeks ago in Part 1 of this blog topic we discussed the need for cloud optimization tools to help enterprises with the problem of cloud cost control. Amazon Web Services (AWS) even goes as far as suggesting the following simple steps to control their costs (which can also be applied to Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, but of course with slightly different terminology):
- Right-size your services to meet capacity needs at the lowest cost;
- Save money when you reserve;
- Use the spot market;
- Monitor and track service usage;
- Use Cost Explorer to optimize savings; and
- Turn off idle instances (we added this one).
A variety of third-party tools and services have popped up in the market over the past few years to help with cloud cost optimization — why? Because upwards of $23B was spent on public cloud infrastructure in 2016, and spending continues to grow at a rate of 40% per year. Furthermore, depending on who you talk to, roughly 25% of public cloud spend is wasted or not optimized — that’s a huge market! If left unchecked, this waste problem is supposed to triple to over $20B by 2020 — enter the vultures (full disclosure, we are also a vulture, but the nice kind). Most of these tools are lumped under the Cloud Management category, which includes subcategories like Cost Visibility and Governance, Cost Optimization, and Cost Control vendors — we are a cost control vendor to be sure.
Why do you, an enterprise, care? Because there are very unique and subtle differences between the tools that fit into these categories, so your use case should dictate where you go for what — and that’s what I am trying to help you with. So, why am I a credible source to write about this (and not just because ParkMyCloud is the best thing since sliced bread)?
Well, yesterday we had a demo with a FinTech company in California that was interested in Cost Control, or thought they were. It turns out that what they were actually interested in was Cost Visibility and Reporting; the folks we talked to were in Engineering Finance, so their concerns were primarily with billing metrics, business unit chargeback for cloud usage, RI management, and dials and widgets to view all stuff AWS and GCP billing related. Instead of trying to force a square peg into a round hole, we passed them on to a company in this space who’s better suited to solve their immediate needs. In response, the Finance folks are going to put us in touch with the FinTech Cloud Ops folks who care about automating their cloud cost control as part of their DevOps processes.
This type of situation happens more often than not. We have a lot of enterprise customers using ParkMyCloud along with CloudHealth, CloudChekr, Cloudability, and Cloudyn because in general, they provide Cost Visibility and Governance, and we provide actionable, automated Cost Control.
As this is our blog, and my view from the street — we have 200+ customers now using ParkMyCloud, and we demo to 5–10 enterprises per week. Based on a couple of generic customer uses cases where we have strong familiarity, here’s what you need to know to stay ahead of the game:
- Cost Visibility and Governance: CloudHealth, CloudChekr, Cloudability and Cloudyn (now owned by Microsoft)
- Reserved Instance (RI) management — all of the above
- Spot Instance management — SpotInst
- Monitor and Track Usage: CloudHealth, CloudChekr, Cloudability and Cloudyn
- Turn off (park) Idle Resources — ParkMyCloud, Skeddly, Gorilla Stack, BotMetric
- Automate Cost Control as part of your DevOps Process: ParkMyCloud
- Govern User Access to Cloud Console for Start/Stop: ParkMyCloud
- Integrate with Single Sign-On (SSO) for Federated User Access: ParkMyCloud
To summarize, cloud cost control is important, and there are many cloud optimization tools available to assist with visibility, governance, management, and control of your single or multi-cloud environments. However, there are very few tools which allow you to set up automated actions leveraging your existing enterprise tools like Ping, Okta, Atlassian, Jenkins, and Slack. Make sure you are not only focusing on cost visibility and recommendations, but also on action-oriented platforms to really get the best bang for your buck.
Originally published at www.parkmycloud.com on September 22, 2017.
