So far, technology buying has always been a critical business decision. Getting approvals over large capital investments has been a real challenge. Given the nature of this process, all hardware and software technology costs have always had a special status in the engineering world. Need for new technology has always been looked at where engineering teams needed to create ROI justifications. Those not so convincing excel projections and extremely annoying review meetings where business managers expect engineering teams to have crystal balls to predict the outcomes of these technology investment in clear financial terms! These once-in-a-few-years CAPEX justifications also had a clear downside. The engineering teams at large were mostly clueless about these cost discussions. The senior engineering manager levels had to invest a small percentage of their time to get these approvals through before getting back to their real work. Net-Net, cost of technology was never an engineering problem to solve!
Until Cloud happened. As the saying goes — “Never say Never! “
With advent of cloud based services and on-demand pay-as-you-go models, one of the biggest disruption has been financial modelling of technology costs. The shift from CAPEX to OPEX itself has been a point of concern as it has an impact on company bottom lines. Moreover, it needs to go through a CFO sign-off. In addition, the larger concern with the pay as you go — OPEX models is also the fact that in the world of elastic computing and unconstrained resource capacity, there is no good way to predict or control OPEX spend on cloud consumption. This inherent variability in use of cloud computing resources has also pushed the ownership of managing cloud costs with engineering teams. Engineering teams now have to be fully accountable to the costs of their cloud consumption. The transition for engineering teams into owning the cost management in the cloud world has so far been achieved due to the fact that cloud offers everything through programmatic controls. Engineers are able to solve the cost problems by doing what they do best — Solve problems programmatically.
While engineering teams for software projects and companies, who were early adopters of cloud, could take on this challenge due to their technical skills, cloud adoption rates will continue to increase. The skills and time involved to manage costs will continue to grow. Thus, all cloud operating teams may not be able to manage this without the right technical support. Thankfully there are innovative solutions available to manage cloud costs and have good visibility and governance around cost management.
Some of the most important use cases for cost management are:
- Save and Reserve — Cost Savings is a critical activity that engineering teams have to track constantly on cloud. Botmetric offers significant features and insights to help customers save on their cloud spend. Read the recent blog on AWS RI Planning here
- Budget & Chargeback — Ease of spend on cloud by swiping a credit card with no controls on provisioning resources makes it a financial nightmare to track costs and allocate it effectively to payers who are paying for the services. The need for tracking where costs are being incurred and for whom (which projects, business, etc.) and ensuring proper chargeback needs specialized tooling and automation
- Forecasting & Trend Reporting — Cloud users need ability to forecast their spend and also view across different slices of information and across multiple time periods to analyze the historic
In the world of Cloud, cost is an engineering problem. Managing costs is a daily activity which needs ongoing tracking and analysis. Cloud Management solutions from Botmetric ensures that this new engineering problem is addressed productively, at ease and the dev teams need not sweat it out to meet their responsibility. Get started with a 14-day trial today.
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This exclusive blog post is written by our Chief Delivery Officer, Anindo Sengupta. To read one of his Linkedin Pulse posts on automating governance on AWS using tags, click here.
