Cloud Infrastructures are one of the key resources for both tech and non-tech Startups today. Most startups today plan their cloud infrastructures needs once during the initial setup & revisit only once in a year and have their own initial set of Cloud KPIs to monitor. Typically, there would be an element of over allocation of resources which would be impacting cost significantly but the same resources could be highly underutilized for one reason or the other.
Cloud administration tools provided by most cloud providers focus more on effectively administering the resources. Many organizations dedicate a desk that would master the art of cloud administration and come up with insights to optimize cloud resource. As cloud technologies themselves are rapidly evolving, the complexity involved in optimizing puts enormous stress on startup teams to deflect resources away from cloud optimization.
Tackle criticality of cost management in cloud
One of the direct fallouts of lack of cloud optimization is cost. Cost doesn’t manifest itself in the form of money but also time, effort & efficiency. As startups strive to keep cloud costs minimum, the need for an automated tool becomes all the more necessary.
As a result, startups would need a simple, plug & play tool like Botmetric to handle cost leakages effectively. These tools are easy to configure & implement by a cloud administration newbie. Many organizations of all sizes are realizing 64.3% lower Total Cost of Ownership, $1.5M in benefits per application, and a five-year ROI of 560% on AWS Cloud. Startups are leveraging Botmetric to bring down their compute costs by 50–60%.
Botmetric has Cloud Analytical tools that crunch the logs of the cloud resources and provide insights like whether a resource can be shut down and released because of underutilization etc. Resource optimization alone is not the sole concern of effective cloud management. Security, data backup and recovery factors also need to be factored in because they also impact resource utilization and costs.
Botmetric tools can diagnose & also provide insights as to how these mutually conflicting concerns are addressed optimally to reduce cost.
Core Cloud KPIs to be tracked
There are essentially four key dimensions in which we need to analyze the effectiveness of cloud infrastructure. These are:
- Performance
- Cost
- Security
- Data Backup/Recovery
The Cost dimension is directly impacted by all the other parameters listed. To improve performance, we might assign more resources increasing costs. To improve security, we would activate logs increasing costs. We might also create additional resources for backing up our data in redundant server instances adding up the cost. The key question in cloud optimization would then be how to ensure that we balance out the cost with the other parameters by finding the right mix of resources.
Cloud KPIs are ratios which we can calculate against two dimensions such as resource/service vs cost.
Botmetric Cost Analytics module provides a ‘Spend by Service’ analysis from which we can identify the spread of the money spent across the various Cloud Services one has utilized. There are many other KPIs which can help identify whether the resources are utilized as they have be paid for.
Another aspect of cloud optimization is prioritizing of KPIs as core & non-core. Core KPIs tend to impact the running of day to day operations & affect business profitability.
The following are some of the core KPIs that need to tracked from all the four critical dimensions:
- Utilization Rates by Service and Resources
- Spend by Service
- Spend by Zone
- Spend by Users, Groups, and Applications etc.
- Security Rules by Resources
- Spend for Backup/Recovery
By analyzing the above KPIs and their trends over time, we would be able to upscale or downscale the resources availed in the cloud, resulting in desired optimization.
Reserved Instance Pricing Model as Additional Dimension
Many cloud providers including AWS provide significant discounts if the resources are procured for a year in advance instead of month-wise piecemeal procurement.
Cloud administrators have to figure out how to balance on-demand purchases and reserved-instance purchases because one should not over-project demand requirements and buy more advance or under-purchase and pay more later using on-demand pricing model. This dynamic pricing model is yet another critical dimension to be considered while configuring cloud infrastructure. The following two Cloud KPIs are critical for analyzing cost from the pricing model dimension:
- Spend as ‘Planned vs Actuals’
- Spend by ‘On-Demand vs Reserved Instance’
One can track the usage metrics from the log data, apply statistical methods to arrive at future projections and can make recommendations on the balance between On-Demand resources and Reserved Instance resources. Botmetric RI (Reserved Instance) planner provides timely reserved instances recommendations & projections and can automatically suggest the resources to be purchased under both On-Demand Model & Reserved Instance model. It also displays a list of reservations which aren’t being used by any running instance & offers reservations modifications suggestions. For a startup, this saves sufficient manual analysis time.
Life on cloud, made easy by Botmetric
Startup technology heads might find the process of analyzing the various KPIs to come up with the optimal mix of the resources very tedious & time consuming. For the time-crunched startup team, Botmetric Insights dashboard directly provides actionable insights on where to optimize.
By adopting Botmetric, startups can now optimize their spending on Cloud Infrastructure without having to put the effort of analyzing the impact of the Cloud KPIs on cost. Get started with Botmetric 14-day trial, today.
So how are you leveraging cloud to keep costs optimal & achieve your startup goals? Shout out to us on Twitter & we’re all ears!
