EverestDx Optix : Based on Cloud FinOps Best Practices

EverestDx solution to Cloud FinOps is our AI powered tool – Optix. With Optix, you gain unparalleled visibility, allocation precision, custom chargeback-show back, Efficient budgeting and forecasting and continuous cost optimization for your enterprise cloud.According to Gartner, worldwide spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 21.7% to a total of $597.3 billion in 2024 but an alarming 30% of the spend is estimated to be wasted.

While cloud technology offers scalability, performance and flexibility, many businesses struggle to maintain close governance over cloud costs. This is where Cloud FinOps becomes essential. Cloud FinOps focuses on fostering a culture, establishing best practices and adhering to principles that control cloud costs while maximizing business value. It achieves this by

  1. 1. Providing granular-level cost visibility.
  2. 2. Ensuring financial accountability across the organization.
  3. 3. Promoting the concept of trade-offs between cost, quality, and speed, thereby empowering teams to make informed decisions..

Cloud FinOps Best Practices

Cloud Cost Visibility & Reporting

Granular Insights: Cost visibility should be detailed enough to provide meaningful insights.

Real-Time Monitoring: Real-time views drive better cloud utilization and expedite remediation activities, enhancing efficiency.

Integration with Various Data Sources: Effective cost visibility integrates with diverse cost data sources.

Trend Analysis: Cloud cost views should offer period trend analysis.

Customizable Views: Cost views must be customizable to deliver relevant insights to different personas across the organization, as one static view cannot accommodate the varied needs of different stakeholders.

Cloud cost visibility involves monitoring cloud expenditure at a level that allows organizations to understand spending patterns, identify issues, and take appropriate remedial actions to optimize cloud costs versus the value generated. Key aspects of cost visibility include:

With Optix, enterprises gain cloud spend reporting capabilities that integrate with their custom organizational structures in real-time. This integration ensures that cost views are accessible across the organization, catering to different cost centers and their respective personas. These views can be further broken down into pre-configured business layers, providing insights specific to each segment. Finally, Optix’s Cloud resource module provides a 360degree view of the Cloud resources – Accounts, Compute, Storage, Databases, Management Group, backup services and Network and their trends across cost centers and pre-configured business layers.

Optix integrates seamlessly with AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) and Azure Cost Management and Billing reports to deliver actionable visual insights, offering a single pane of glass across multiple environments. It simplifies the complexities of varied billing formats and cost structures by normalizing the data and presents a unified view.

Optix provides cost overview trends and distribution by configurable business layers, helping to identify patterns and anomalies that can be addressed through remediation.

Its custom reports and widgets enable organizations to create tailored reporting views that deliver accurate and effective insights specific to the target audience persona. By customizing reports, stakeholders receive relevant data aligned with their roles and decision-making needs, enhancing decision-making efficiency and improving communication across the organization.

Cloud Cost Accountability

Cloud cost accountability involves tracking expenditures, applying optimization guardrails, maintaining costs within budget thus maximizing the value generated. This responsibility must extend to the very edges of the organization, making every team and team member accountable for the costs they incur.

Cloud usage and cost accountability should be decentralized, ensuring that every engineer and team is responsible for their incurred costs.

Budget configurations should be designed to set budgets at levels that promote individual accountability and provide insights to help teams manage their ongoing expenses.

Budget utilization should be flexible, allowing teams to utilize their allocations as they deem fit.

Optix provides a comprehensive view of tagged, untagged, and untaggable resources. Custom tagging strategies enable the mapping of resources to organizational cost centers and extend accountability to the edge. Optix also offers automation for resource tagging where possible.

Optix addresses accountability through its Cost Allocation module, which facilitates configuring chargebacks showbacks to specific business layers for granular control. This module helps propagate organizational hierarchy to the billing data and derive actionable insights from cost analysis. ChargebacksShowbacks can be further broken down by specific cost centers, sub-business units, accounts, projects, and products. The module also provides visibility into unallocated costs.

The Budget and Forecast module in Optix implements automated capacity and utilization management. With Optix, enterprises can set up budgets at desired custom levels, define durations, calculation logic, and offsets. Optix provides real-time views of budget allocations against custom business layers and actual incurred costs to date, offering insights to individual teams on their cost efficiency.

Through the Cost Allocation and Budget & Forecast modules, Optix helps enterprises drive accountability by:

  • 1. Providing clear financial guardrails down to the edge,
  • 2. Enabling teams and individuals to monitor their usage efficiency against these guardrails,
  • 3. Accurately charging every penny of incurred costs back to the responsible parties.

Cloud Cost Optimization

Cloud Cost Optimization involves making strategic decisions to enhance cloud efficiency and cost-effectiveness, driven by business value. While the variable cloud cost model and diverse service options can be complex, they offer flexibility to meet the different requirements of an enterprise.

Key aspects of Cloud Cost Optimization include:

Leveraging the variable cost model of the cloud

Making proactive optimization decisions and continuous adjustments

Automating optimization actions

The Optix Cloud Optimization module can be tailored for various environments, including AWS, Azure, GCP, and private clouds. Optix’s provides recommendations for optimization with additional option to automate remediation actions thus ensuring continuous optimization. Once deployed, the environment is continuously monitored, new opportunities based on changes are reported, automatically remediated. They manage the complexity of the cloud provider service catalog cost on behalf of the enterprise.

Optix also provides a detailed view of potential savings through remediation actions and lost opportunities. The Savings Report offers a comprehensive view of past optimization efforts and future opportunities, broken down into custom service categories, business cost centers, accounts, and products.

The Reservation and Savings Plan module of Optix delivers a comprehensive view of the state of Reserved Instances (RI) and Savings Plans (SP). These reports can be segmented by cost centers, business units, projects, accounts, regions, plan types, and products, offering granular insights tailored to specific needs. The module also compares the savings achieved through RIs and SPs against on-demand costs.

By continuously monitoring the environment for optimization opportunities, providing recommendations across multiple environments, and automating necessary remediation actions, Optix helps enterprises capitalize on the variable cost model of the cloud while offering proactive recommendations 24/7.