CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE COSTSUnderstanding and Controlling

About me

• Thomas Orozco

• Developer Advocate at Scalr

• Cloud Management company

Image Credit: Samuel Q. Green

Why talk about cost?

• Our mission is to help enterprises drive successful cloud adoption

• Cost-effectiveness is an integral dimension of that success

Image Credit: Stephen JB. Thomas

About you

• DevOps?

• IT?

• Finance?

• Other?

Image Credit: Wilson Joseph

What this talk is about

• Understanding the implications of cloud adoption from a cost perspective

• Understanding what works, what doesn’t

Cloud: what changes?

• Developer-centric provisioning process

• IT no longer owns the provisioning process

• No way back

Image Credit: Tommy Lau

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?Cost Tracking for Cloud Resources

Two key problems

• Visibility Problem: Understanding costs

• Saving Problem: Reducing costs

Image Credit: Marcio Duarte

3 Key Audiences

• DevOps teams

• Enterprise IT

• Finance

Image Credit: Stephen Copinger

THE VISIBILITY PROBLEMWhy is it hard to account for usage of cloud resources

DevOps on Visibility

• Tasked with sticking to a budget

• “How much is this going to cost me? How do I use my budget responsibly?”

Image Credit: Joe Harrison

Enterprise IT on Visibility

• Tasked with minimizing waste and optimizing usage

• “How do I tell who owns this resource?”

Image Credit: Matthew Hawdon

Finance on Visibility

• Tasked with breaking down the cloud bill and allocating it across business units

• “How do I tell which business unit is responsible for these costs?”

Image Credit: Roy Verhaag

Overall the same problem

• Understanding cloud cost requires visibility on:– The use case– The resources– Their associated costs

• Neither DevOps, IT, nor Finance have that visibility

Existing Solution

• Use metadata (tags) to track resources and link them to their use case and cost

Image Credit: Baabullah Hasan

Tags = extra workload

• Adding tags is more work

• Processing tags is more work

Image Credit: Wayne Middleton

Tags = inherently imperfect

• People forget

• Mandatory tagging is easily circumvented

Image Credit: Maurizio Carpani

THE SAVING PROBLEMWhy is it hard to reduce cloud costs?

Finance on Saving

• Tasked with planning budgets according to cash flows

• With visibility, finance can define budgets for organizational units

Enterprise IT on Saving

• Tasked with enforcing that business units stay on budget

• With visibility, IT can track effective usage against budgets, and enforce those

DevOps on Saving

• Ultimately, DevOps engineers control the usage of cloud resources

• With visibility on their budget usage, DevOps engineers can identify areas for improvement

Overall, the same solution

• Solving the visibility problem enables saving

THANK YOU!