Mastering Cloud Cost Control: Expert Insights to Optimize Cloud Infrastructure Spending

1. Understanding and Controlling Cloud Infrastructure Costs

2. About me • Thomas Orozco • Developer Advocate at Scalr • Cloud Management company Image Credit: Samuel Q. Green

3. 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

4. About you • DevOps? • IT? • Finance? • Other? Image Credit: Wilson Joseph

5. What this talk is about • Understanding the implications of cloud adoption from a cost perspective • Understanding what works, what doesn’t

6. Cloud: what changes? • Developer-centric provisioning process • IT no longer owns the provisioning process • No way back Image Credit: Tommy Lau

7. Cost Tracking for Cloud Resources What is the problem?

8. Two key problems • Visibility Problem: Understanding costs • Saving Problem: Reducing costs Image Credit: Marcio Duarte

9. 3 Key Audiences • DevOpsteams • Enterprise IT • Finance Image Credit: Stephen Copinger

10. Why is it hard to account for usage of cloud resources The visibility Problem

11. 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

12. Enterprise IT on Visibility • Tasked with minimizing waste and optimizing usage • “How do I tell who owns this resource?” Image Credit: Matthew Hawdon

13. 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

14. 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

15. Existing Solution • Use metadata (tags) to track resources and link them to their use case and cost Image Credit: Baabullah Hasan

16. Tags = extra workload • Adding tags is more work • Processing tags is more work Image Credit: Wayne Middleton

17. Tags = inherently imperfect • People forget • Mandatory tagging is easily circumvented Image Credit: Maurizio Carpani

18. Why is it hard to reduce cloud costs? The saving problem

19. Finance on Saving • Tasked with planning budgets according to cash flows • With visibility, finance can define budgets for organizational units

20. 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

21. 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

22. Overall, the same solution • Solving the visibility problem enables saving

23. Thank you!