Understanding and Controlling
CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE COSTS
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
Cost Tracking for Cloud Resources
WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?
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
Why is it hard to account for usage of cloud resources
THE VISIBILITY PROBLEM
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
Why is it hard to reduce cloud costs?
THE SAVING PROBLEM
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!