AWS Cost Management: 6 Tools IT Can Use
In the on-demand, pay-as-you-go cloud world dominated by Amazon Web Services, it's easy for costs to spiral out of control. To help, here are 6 tools to help manage and monitor your AWS spending.
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The promise of saving money is a major factor in the cloud's explosive growth. But the pay-as-you-go cloud world, which is currently dominated by Amazon Web Services, can easily and quickly end up costing you more than what you'd hoped to save by migrating in the first place.
Managing the AWS cloud bill gets to be a bigger headache every week for the IT manager in charge of controlling the cost of cloud computing. As use of the cloud grows, so does the complexity of the bill. There's precious little ability to extract the detailed information needed to see who drove the increase each month.
Yes, Amazon supplies some ability to set accounts using tags and consolidated billing. This capacity allows an IT manager to separate production cloud accounts from dev and test accounts. But it becomes daunting for the IT department to serve 10,000 employees.
If by the end of the year, most of those employees are in a business unit that wants its own account on EC2, the company will run out of tags long before it runs out of users.
With 37% of IT spending on servers, switches, and storage headed for one form or another of cloud computing, it's extremely likely that managing the cost is on the C-suite's radar.
Two major challenges facing IT managers charged with keeping tabs on the AWS bill: How to make cloud users more accountable and how to measure efficiency of cloud usage.
[See 6 Signs You Need a Multi-Cloud Strategy.]
Amazon Web Services recognizes the problem. First, it tried to ease the problem of ordering the correctly priced server by offering prospective users Trusted Advisor. The tool can take a user's specifications and recommend an instance configuration that's a match without building in much surplus capacity.
AWS describes its online adviser as a resource "to help you reduce cost [and] increase performance ..." What more could you ask? Perhaps more visibility, tracking, and feedback regarding the operation of what the Trusted Adviser set up.
Remember, the cost picture can be complicated by outside events, such as Britain's vote to exit the European Union. Microsoft announced in October that it will raise prices as of Jan. 1, 2017 on Azure cloud computing in Britain to make up for the decline of the British pound since the Brexit vote. Can Amazon be far behind?
Since then, AWS and several promising young third-parties, such as Cloudyn, CloudHealth, Cloud Checkr, Cloudability, Apptio, and Uptime Software, have come up with additional billing management and cloud cost-management offerings. Here's a look at six tools for cost accountability and management as the reliance on the cloud continues to grow.
All the tools highlighted have been tested by customers and most have won acceptance in the marketplace over the past two to three years. Each contains multiple cost management features, with at least one of particular strength that makes it worth considering by IT managers responsible for cloud operations.
In April 2014, AWS introduced a tool called Cost Explorer, which became a tab in the management console. It presents and analyzes historical information on a customer account in three views: monthly spend by AWS services, monthly spend by linked accounts, and total daily spend.
Cost Explorer has gained a forecasting mechanism that projects your next three months of bills based on past use. But if Cost Explorer doesn't have enough information to be sure its forecast is within 80%-95% certainty on the bill, it won't make a forecast.
RightScale's Cloud Analytics Service will do the same forecasting, with the benefit of letting you include private cloud costs, as well as that of the AWS public cloud.
In June 2015, AWS added the Budgets feature on its Billing and Cost Management Dashboard of the management console. A customer gets to create two budgets for free with the tool. After that, the charge is $.02 per day for each additional active budget created. The features gets the customer out of viewing historical data and into projecting what usage will be and what it will cost. Lest you think one budget is all that's needed for a big customer, it's expected to be used in a more granular fashion for each team, project or business unit. Budgets make use of the usage data collected by Cost Explorer. Each AWS payer account is allowed to create up to 20,000 budgets.
In order to manage costs, IT managers need to be able to track assets in the cloud. CloudCheckr emphasizes monitoring assets and tracking their usage. It then presents a visual display of the results. That gives it an opportunity to highlight little-used or unused, but forgotten, virtual servers that are still contributing to the bill.
When it spots a mismatch between what was provisioned and what's being used, it can make a right-sizing recommendation. If security is important, then it might hold down security expenses through its ability to check for best practices on the cloud assets it's inspecting. That's how it got its foot in the door to monitor AWS GovCloud, where most monitors are excluded.
Cloud Cruiser also allows tracing of assets on AWS (and other clouds) and provides a platform with which different things may be done with the information. For example, it not only records usage, but also allows the IT manager to set thresholds at which that usage threatens to go beyond projections. The historical usage figures can be projected to construct budgets, then alerts are sent when current usage is threatening to exceed budget before the end of the month. Cloud Cruiser also offers the e-book Trim the Cloud Fat.
Tagging is a good method of making the AWS bill more intelligible. But IT managers complain that the tagging supported by Amazon doesn't allow them to see everything they want to decipher in their bills. Cloudyn is a third-party tool provider that uses a set of detailed metrics and more detailed tagging to expand the amount of information that IT managers can get out of their bill.
In a survey of its own customers, Cloudyn concluded that 80% were underutilizing their virtual servers, or had extended the enterprise data center's practice of overprovisioning to the cloud. The survey also found that 15% had not provisioned enough resource and were forcing users to wait for responses due to overutilization of their virtual servers. In other words, detailed metrics and detailed tagging can help the customer get it right.
Tagging is a good method of making the AWS bill more intelligible. But IT managers complain that the tagging supported by Amazon doesn't allow them to see everything they want to decipher in their bills. Cloudyn is a third-party tool provider that uses a set of detailed metrics and more detailed tagging to expand the amount of information that IT managers can get out of their bill.
In a survey of its own customers, Cloudyn concluded that 80% were underutilizing their virtual servers, or had extended the enterprise data center's practice of overprovisioning to the cloud. The survey also found that 15% had not provisioned enough resource and were forcing users to wait for responses due to overutilization of their virtual servers. In other words, detailed metrics and detailed tagging can help the customer get it right.
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