For more than a decade, digital transformation has been the talk within businesses. One of the core elements in this journey is the migration to the public cloud, which adopts new ways of thinking and working the infrastructure and applications. This journey centers on automating infrastructure and application provisioning, rapidly detecting and responding in operations, containerizing applications, and leveraging serverless technology or other services from cloud providers for rapid prototyping, innovation, and adoption. Executives prioritize this initiative to expedite the pace of innovation, save on capital costs and time to set up infrastructure and realize new ways of delivering services. In the urgency to be part of the wave, some companies rush to adopt an “all-in” approach too quickly without sufficient due diligence. This presents a risk of failure, beyond a technical point of view which is the financial viewpoint. One of the elements that customers must realize is that they need to have a good handle on the expenses that have now moved from CAPEX to OPEX.
The Flexera 2024 report shown below are key findings from a survey of 753 cloud decision-makers and users. It validates why managing the cloud spend is critical for organizations as this was the biggest challenge, even higher than security in the cloud or lack of resources and expertise in this space.
AWS provides the tools needed to manage cloud spend on an ongoing basis. These tools help businesses leverage AWS services in the most cost-effective way so that they can continue their cloud adoption. AWS makes several dashboards available through Amazon QuickSight. QuickSight is a Business Intelligence (BI) reporting and visualization tool derived from usage data. Here is the high-level flow to apply analytics to identify spend categories, so that remedial actions can be taken to optimize the spend.
It is well recognized in all businesses that optimized cost management improves the financial bottom line and hence is critical to their industry success. But not all of them are equipped with the expertise to set this up in public cloud and monitor it on an ongoing basis. As a result, it is important that businesses reach out to seek such services from trusted partners with expertise to help in this initiative.
One of the potential implications of a lack of cost management control is the runaway cost that could be incurred if there were to be a cyber incident. One such case would be an auto scaling event that spawned multiple instances to cater to an unexpected increased load caused by a cyber-attack. Not only does this case call for appropriate security measures in perimeter, network, and endpoint controls to prevent such incidents, it also needs technical cost management controls to limit the extent to which such costs could multiply. One way is to limit the maximum number of instances that could be spun up, should a breach were to occur despite the technical controls already in place.
This article delves deeper into the tools available from AWS for cost management and optimization. But the necessity of cost management to set up and monitor costs, as well as applying technical controls to prevent cost overruns equally apply to all the public clouds in the market.
There are three useful dashboards that will appeal to executives, finance personnel, business unit owners, and engineers alike. These dashboards collect data from several underlying AWS data sources pertaining to costs and present them for easy consumption. All the dashboards presented in this article can be customized, and support drill downs. The graphics shown for each dashboard are just one example of what can be obtained as insights.
- Cost Intelligence Dashboard (CID) for a high-level report on billing charges by AWS Service, month-by-month or even day-by-day.
Here is a CID report on the day-by-day costs of each service over the previous two months.
- Cloud Usage Dashboard on OpenSearch (CUDOS) for in-depth insights and targeted recommendations
CUDOS Dashboard gives not only an overall view of the costs, but also the month over month (MoM) trend of spend categorized by AWS services, the accounts or the API requests that are spending the most for a given service. CUDOS also gives insights into data transfer charges, spikes, the services that caused the spike, and many more. Here’s a report of the MoM trend.
- Key Performance Indicator (KPI) dashboard to define and track KPIs
KPI Tracker displays the most often tracked KPI goals of an organization. Those in green on the right panel shows that the KPI goals are being exceeded. These KPI goal percentages can be adjusted in the dashboard as needed. Other tabs in the KPI dashboard help drill down.
Cost optimization must be in every organization’s DNA
The Flexera 2024 analysis estimates that 27% of cloud spend is potentially wasted and could be conserved. Being cost aware must not just be in the interests of the finance team in an organization. All users in an organization – application developers, network engineers and architects, and cyber security professionals must also be cost-aware and cost-sensitive to help their business optimize the usage and the costs, thereby helping improve the financial bottom line. Analyzing the operational costs can also serve as a good data point in a cost model to justify ROI through time and cost savings or cost avoidance.
Other tools offered by AWS and topics beyond what were discussed in this article are:
- Cost Explorer to see the historical spend categories and setting up budget alerts and notified if monthly costs exceed expected maximums to understand what caused it and how it can be managed
- Cost Anomaly Detector that leverages advanced Machine Learning technologies to identify anomalous spend and root causes
- Compute Optimizer Dashboard on ways to save money by right sizing instances in each business unit
- Use of Reserved instances to save on costs for the minimum number of instances that need to be running in a business
- Use of appropriate storage tiers based on the use case
- Use of Event Bridge for scheduled automation
Summary
A successful journey to the cloud is more than migrating workloads, developing containerized cloud-native applications, and automating provisioning and operations. While these are absolutely outcomes to target, managing costs in a cloud environment is an equally essential element to justify the presence and further the growth and adoption of services available. Dashboards from AWS provide data points and insights that can help optimize costs. Organizations without the necessary expertise to set this up and monitor it on an on-going basis in AWS or any other public cloud in the market can seek the services from Fortinet’s Cloud Consulting Services.
Srikant (Sri) Ramachandran is a Principal Cloud Solutions Architect at Fortinet Cloud Consulting Services working with customers across verticals architecting secure cloud solutions. Sri has been a technologist for over three decades and is an industry expert with extensive experience across multiple technology domains of Public Cloud, Cybersecurity, and Enterprise Networking spanning pre-sales, solutions architecture, and implementation. Sri holds several vendor certifications as well as industry-recognized certifications such as CISSP with a Master of Engineering degree in Computer Science. Sri can be reached at consulting@fortinet.com.
