Augmenting Cloud Resource Cost and Governance Insights for Higher and Faster ROI

 A successful cloud cost governance program spanning policies, processes, and tools helps control and optimize the usage of cloud resources. If done right, it keeps cloud costs predictable and drives behavior change among development groups. 

The Stacklet Platform, based on the Cloud Custodian open source project, is a governance-as-code solution that helps fuel cost governance success. The platform provides insights and automated guardrails to optimize spending and foster improved engineering team workflows. With Stacklet Platform, you can visualize, codify, and automate cloud cost governance using a simple, standard policy language that engineering and FinOps teams can understand. You can also implement advanced workflows with sophisticated business logic into your remediation and notification playbooks via the same policies. The Stacklet Platform also comes with comprehensive out-of-the-box cloud cost management and optimization capabilities to help you get started rapidly.

Stacklet now includes cloud resource cost data to help FinOps and Engineering teams better drive action and control costs more intelligently. 

With this latest release, the Stacklet Platform quantifies potential waste and inefficiency, so users make more informed spending decisions. On day one, engineering and FinOps teams can identify likely problems, see how much these problems are costing their organizations, and take a range of actions—from notification to remediation—all based on the same human-readable policies. 

“Stacklet Platform has helped us automate cost governance in the last few months, so we can manage cloud costs and improve our team's productivity. The new resource cost in the platform is exciting to see. It will help us unlock new insights and context by getting comprehensive policy and cost data in one tool and workflow. These new capabilities will also help create better awareness of cost optimization opportunities and drive faster action from our engineering teams by creating a sense of urgency.” Director Cost Optimization at a technology company 

Cloud adoption is still going strong. However, controlling cloud spending has become increasingly important in today's uncertain economic conditions. When budgets and resources are tight, FinOps and engineering teams often struggle to identify and go after the right cloud cost optimization opportunities. Stacklet Platform’s new capabilities automatically attribute resource costs to optimization opportunities identified by the solution’s policies. You can now see the average cost of a group of resources or a single resource that does not comply with a specific cost control policy.

Screen A: Sample dashboard provides a contextualized view of cost, policy violations, and recommended remediations. 

Instead of starting with raw costs and fishing around for potential problems to solve, Stacklet lets you immediately identify the issues that have the most significant impact on costs and then enables you to fix these. The ability to power intelligent remediation is a crucial differentiator of the Stacklet Platform. Given that, we have ensured that cost and optimization analysis is cohesive from remediation efforts. Cost data is displayed as part of existing policy analysis and remediation workflows, so you can identify opportunities and rapidly take action (as shown in screen A). 

The platform also enables teams to analyze cost optimization opportunities in the context of the associated remediation effort and risk. This improves decision-making and helps teams make the best decisions.  

Screen B: Sample cost optimization prioritization matrix.

These new capabilities provide actionable insights by overlaying cloud usage, spending, and cost optimization data. Traditionally, multiple tools and workflows would be required to gain this multi-dimensional view. For example, in the chart below, you can analyze the efficiency of various cloud accounts by comparing account spend and total optimization opportunities.  

Screen C: This chart shows total cloud spending, inefficient spending, and saving opportunities by account.

Stacklet Platform: What’s Coming Next for FinOps Teams

We are also planning on adding the following capabilities in the near future:

• Automatically forecast the total value of policy implementation. This would help FinOps teams justify and prioritize cloud cost optimization efforts. 
  
• Cost attribution to executed remediations or actions. This would enable FinOps teams to justify and measure the success of their efforts.
  
  To see these new capabilities or get a general demo of the Stacklet Platform, please request a demo here.