Managing your cloud — where to get started

Customers frequently ask me where to get started with managing their cloud spend. There are some simple ways that customers can quickly identify savings regardless of the maturity of their cost optimization journey. Here’s where Caliper can help.

Visibility

The first step in an effective FinOps process is to gain visibility into your cloud spend –  you can’t fix what you can’t see. With Caliper, you can view and analyze your AWS cost and usage.  You can do this at a high level on AWS accounts, or much more granularly at the instance ID level. Caliper identifies trends and facilitates drilling down into the different products or services by simply clicking on the visualization.  

Anomaly Detection

Anomalies are budget blowers. Caliper searches for anomalies in the products where you spend the most, then generates a precise heat map of hourly spending over the past month for every major product. Drill down on spikes in usage to investigate further. Just select a product and look at the spend or usage by hour and day of month to see any periods of higher usage during the last month. The heat map visualization makes the hot spots easy to find. 

Balance

Controlling cloud spend is also about matching capacity with demand. That means ensuring the right balance between savings plans, on-demand, spot, and reserved instances. You can use EC2 Auto Scaling to get the right balance of on-demand and spot instances. Then let Caliper build a dashboard displaying the spend by each of these payment-type categories by simply filtering on EC2 to see how effectively you are balancing a workload over time. 

Turn off the lights

My grandfather spent his formative years during the Great Depression, and I remember he always reminded us to turn off the lights when we left a room. Running a cloud environment is no different. One of the easiest ways to quickly identify savings is to ensure that non-production environments are turned off when not in use. Caliper makes it easy to see any spend by hour using your customer specific tag data to quickly identify instances or team members unnecessarily running 24 hours a day.  

Grouping

Grouping accounts or tags in a way that allows you to better analyze cost and usage is the big picture Caliper makes simple. If you tag in a very disaggregated way, grouping tags in logical ways for different personas will help communicate information much more effectively. Caliper allows you to group accounts or tags in a flexible and agile way like no other tool in the market.  By creating different groupings of tags for engineering leaders, DevOps, FinOps, finance or the C-Suite, using Caliper eliminates having to alter your underlying database tags or organization units within AWS.  

Storage

Finally, the obvious one. Ensure you have selected the appropriate storage type taking advantage of the committed and variable costs that match any need. For example, many customers benefit by upgrading their EBS to reduce the variable costs.  Explore what storage selections your teams have made by rapidly building a visualization of storage type and GB/Mo stored.

I saved the best news for last. There’s a lot here, but Caliper’s implementation time is less than 15 minutes. Let us show you how quick and easy it is to wrangle cloud spend. Get started today at millworks.ai/caliper