It’s critically important to see, manage, and measure cloud infrastructure costs in a context that makes sense for your specific business. Being able to align cloud costs to the products and services you deliver to end users ensures that you have the complete picture of the cost of those services.
Why does this matter? It’s simple economics: knowing these metrics raises awareness and accountability of your cloud spend. You can track and learn the details of your utilization, which in turn shapes and guides your decision-making.
The end game, of course, is to optimize your spend; to become cost-efficient. Or put another way, keep your spend in check and even lower it. This information lets you set up thresholds to control your outlay and stay within your forecast and budgeting. Setting a budget that yields end-of-month or quarter savings is certainly gratifying. However, the true overrun challenge arises with unexpected costs.
That’s where Yotascale’s ability to forecast cloud spend with over 90 percent accuracy is particularly useful. Yotascale does this not just at the company level, but also in relation to each department or cost center.
To make the smartest decisions on cloud costing, you need near real-time visibility of your cost and usage information. Having that, you can charge back to the appropriate entities. But such visibility is not so easily achieved. Many organizations miss understanding the multiple, interdependent nature and operational levels of their cloud infrastructure. Knowing these is critical to aligning your cloud provider bill to your operational goals, as well as planning and setting cost expectations, not to mention scaling and scheduling your services.
To take control of your costs and optimize your spend, there are three ways you need to break down cloud costs—at a minimum—to ensure your business is seeing things clearly.
“Organizations waste 32% of cloud spend, up from 30% last year”
– Flexera 2022 State of the Cloud Report
You need visibility into which 32% is wasted in your organization.
Organizations with multiple stakeholders view cloud cost through different lenses. A finance perspective might break down costs by COGS, tenants, or end-customers. A business owner might prefer visibility from a product line-by-product line standpoint. Engineering may need a service-based and containerized view of cost to understand where spend is being wasted.
To address the needs of these various stakeholders, Yotascale provides multiple lenses into the organizational hierarchy; each persona can understand their respective costs in a format that “speaks their language.” Yotascale ingests data from multiple cloud providers and provides customers a single pane of glass view into their cloud costs. For customers with containerized workloads spanning both major cloud providers, gaining granular cost attribution for shared container resources is vital.
Finance chargeback must be connected to your cost management product through a single pane of glass. This unified view of costs incentivizes users when information matches the amount they are charged at the end of the month.
You also want senior leadership to be connected to that single source of truth to inform their directives and decisions on cost optimization. You don’t want them using an alternate source of truth, such as a spreadsheet, to judge the success or failure of initiatives. Having a single, common source of truth allows teams to self-assess, track and improve without having their attention split or contradicted.
Which of your products are performing, and which need help? In order to calculate accurate profit margin or revenue figures for the products or services you build for end users, you need cost information broken down by product or engineering team.
You need to know effective trade-offs among speed, reliability, and cost. Be on the lookout for a bias toward speed and reliability, since these data points are easier to measure and manage on an ongoing basis. Costs may not be represented accurately at the level where these decisions are made.
Engineering teams need to see cost at the most granular level of operations, where applications are being built and run. This enables quick identification of cost-inflating anomalies at the level where they are most likely to occur.
When you’re able to see granular cost-optimization opportunities that apply directly and are relevant to a specific function, you can decide quickly whether to work on them or not. By visualizing these opportunities, teams save a lot of data-crunching by identifying which applications are the highest-value targets for efficiency improvements.
The ability to view budgeting and forecasting costs across both ‘parent’ and ‘child’ departments adds a perspective on what drives these costs up or down. This model addresses not only overspending but also underspending that may be concealing opportunities to find and cut waste because all costs eventually roll up to a top-line value.
Yotascale, on the other hand, provides detailed budget visibility into the ‘child’ of each part of the org structure, which highlights exactly where wastage occurs, persists, or is predominant. So you can address it and improve your bottom line.
A single pane view for multi-cloud usage costs, including containers and Kubernetes, lets you not only manage bills and payment, but also monitor, analyze and allocate charges to the appropriate business entities, whether teams, projects, applications, products, and so on.
There are many ways to think about your cost, but the three listed above—by cost center or business unit; by product or engineering team; and by application, system, or service—are critical, because they connect finance and engineering operations. They enable the ideal granularity and relevance for decision-making by subject matter experts at the edges of your organization. And they form a connection between the core details of how your business is run and your cloud cost management tool. That’s why a single source of truth is crucial for your organization’s most important business decisions.
Yotascale is built by and for engineers to distribute costs and savings opportunities directly to teams who need to see them. This visibility into AWS, Azure, and Kubernetes/containers enables accurate and cost-effective decision-making. (Tags alone cannot solve the cost/visibility equation.)
Yotascale can deliver accurate cost information to the edges of your organization and align cloud costs to your business hierarchy with near real-time details. Optimization opportunities and recommendations go to those teams that most need and can take advantage of them.
