As your organization increases its AWS usage, budget owners and users demand new levels of cost visibility.
In this webinar we explored how you can use the new Cloudability enterprise toolset for controlling and optimizing AWS spending across multiple teams.
Topics include:
- An introduction to the new Cloudability enterprise toolset, including report scheduling, custom dashboarding, and more
- Maintaining cost oversight while giving autonomy to individual teams
- Allocating costs across dozens or hundreds of accounts or applications
- Creating accountability around spending
4. The cloud is no longer one person’s responsibility…!
Engineers Finance Operations Capacity Execs
5. How do you build the culture?!
• Put data in the hands of the people!
• Enact policies and evangelize best practices!
• Incentivize good behavior!
6. Rolling out a cost management program!
• Stage I: Cost visibility for all (emails, alerts, dashboards)
• Stage II: Allocating costs to departments (tags, linked accounts)
• Stage III: Efficiently using only what you need (underutilized, rightsizing)
• Stage IV: Saving by lowering hourly costs (Reserved and Spot Instances)
• Stage V: Tying spending to the bottom line (unit cost)
13. Tips for cost visibility
• Get each stakeholder the spending fundamentals daily
• Let each teams see other teams’ spending habits
• Create broadly available dashboards
14.
15. Case study: Enterprise with 100s of apps!
- Split the detailed billing reports into 750 different views broken
down by BUs/applications/environments/etc.!
- Daily spending updates !
800 users get daily emails with just their spending!
- Oversight for reporting and control!
Execs/finance see the total spending in a simple weekly digest!
"Our goal is to put control of AWS resources in each product
team’s hands. We want to get out of the way but at the same
time we still need oversight to stop overspending.”"
17. First, get everyone involved
๏ Multiple major business units
๏ Lots of products or cost centers
๏ Thousands of shared AWS
resources
๏ Distributed teams using AWS
18. Tools for splitting up resources!
• Tags are highly flexible, but 100% coverage is difficult due to compliance
• Linked accounts offer clean chargeback but limit reporting options
19.
20. Pro-tips: Allocating costs!
• Get consensus on the taxonomy (but let Finance drive)!
• Define 2–3 mandatory tags like “project” or
“environment”!
• Consider a “tag or terminate” rule to enforce
compliance!
21. Case study: The enterprise with 500 linked accounts, !
no oversight, hundreds of influencers!
- Split the accounts based on product and environment!
- SAP data as source of truth for grouping metadata: !
Cost center, product group, business unit, etc!
- Chargeback aligned to finance’s view of the business, !
not just the operational linked account structure!
29. Find M1s that could be upgraded!
1. Newer instance families are faster & cheaper
but have smaller SSDs
2. Look for instances that have Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
devices attached and low ephemeral disk access
3. Move M1 to M3 to save $0.03-$0.10 an hour
Source: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/
31. Tips for encouraging efficient behavior!
• Automate weekly waste reporting to each team!
• Gamify clean-up by creating a visible leaderboard!
• Do a monthly whole-company waste review!
For more check out:
“MegaRun: Behind the 156,000 Core HPC Run”
32. Case study: High traffic site with decentralized ops!
avg hourly node cost ($)
x
avg node uptime (%)
x
sq rt inverse of CPU util (%)
x
avg node running life (hrs)
x
avg daily unique nodes^1.3
Lots of developers using dev/test
instances and forgetting to turn them off!
Used Cloudability API data to normalize
dev/test environment “health”!
Developed an algorithm to determine
health/sickness of any dev/test
environment!
Midge’s law!
34. Spot vs. Reserved Instances?!
Reservations require no engineering, !
enabling finance to autonomously reduce costs!
35. Don’t fear the reservation!
• Prices drop, but not fast enough to erode savings!
• With usage over 50% three-year RIs always won!
Source: http://blog.cloudability.com/cloud-cost-war-shouldnt-stop-buying-reserved-instances/
36. Buy based on current hourly data!
Don’t wait to buy reservations until you’ve completed the
perfect analysis — you’ll waste more money than you save!
37. New Reserved Instance Model (as of 12/2/14)!
- Dropped Lights and Mediums!
- All Reservations now function as Heavy RIs!
- Multiple ways to pay for them now (all, partial, no upfront)!
- “Partial upfront” is the same as legacy Heavy RIs!
- Math and economics essentially the same!
For more, check out:!
blog.cloudability.com!
38. Tips for reservation efficiency!
• Appoint a person to own reservation purchases—!
often a tech-minded finance person!
• Start with an immediate small and uncontroversial buy!
• Buy iteratively on a schedule that you hold sacred!
39. Case study: Buying for 12,500+ daily instances!
25th of the month:!
Central team drives decisions with minimal input from teams!
26th of the month:!
Modifications made each month ahead of purchase!
28th of the month:!
Purchase based on the current month’s utilization data!
40. V. Unit cost!
Efficiency
Savings
Allocation
Unit cost
Visibility
41. Why does unit cost matter?
225
180
135
90
45
0
Dev/Test
POC
App #1
App #3
App #2
Exec team starts
really caring
Hiccup
42. An increasing bill isn’t necessarily a bad thing
225
180
135
90
45
0
The bill still
goes up!
Exec team starts
really caring
Stage III
Efficiency
Stage IV
RIs
48. Case study: Scaled web business pushing unit cost !
• Product owners track unit cost daily tying spending to revenue!
• Operations examines infrastructure changes in terms of unit cost impact!
• Finance reports monthly & quarterly on margin impacts based on unit cost!
• VPs set goals on unit cost and worry less about setting arbitrary total cost
goals!
Shortcut: Track your AWS bill as a percentage of revenue!
50. Things to do right after re:Invent!
I. Visibility: Give stakeholders a daily view into spending!
II. Allocation: Put together a taxonomy with your finance team and start splitting
linked accounts and tagging!
III. Efficiency: Look at underutilized instances (low CPU + BW + disk) and M1 to
M3 candidates (disk access + attached storage)!
IV. Hourly savings: Make an immediate small and uncontroversial RI buy!
V. Unit cost: Determine your top-line business metric, divide costs by them!
51. Start a cost management group !
to share best practices within your company !
and encourage accountability !