How do organizations ensure that they maintain control over their costs when adopting Cloud? Ultimately, the key to controlling cost for cloud infrastructure is to ensure that the organization has visibility over resources that are being provisioned — a task that is easier said than done when developers can provision resources in a single API Call. This talk was presented at the 2014 OpenStack Summit in Atlanta.

1. CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE COSTS
Understanding and Controlling

2. About me
• Thomas Orozco
• Developer Advocate at Scalr
• Cloud Management company
Image Credit: Samuel Q. Green

3. Why talk about cost?
• Our mission is to help
enterprises drive successful
cloud adoption
• Cost-effectiveness is an
integral dimension of that
success
Image Credit: Stephen JB. Thomas

4. About you
• DevOps?
• IT?
• Finance?
• Other?
Image Credit: Wilson Joseph

5. What this talk is about
• Understanding the implications of cloud adoption from a
cost perspective
• Understanding what works, what doesn’t

6. Cloud: what changes?
• Developer-centric provisioning
process
• IT no longer owns the
provisioning process
• No way back
Image Credit: Tommy Lau

7. WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?
Cost Tracking for Cloud Resources

8. Two key problems
• Visibility Problem:
Understanding costs
• Saving Problem: Reducing
costs
Image Credit: Marcio Duarte

9. 3 Key Audiences
• DevOps teams
• Enterprise IT
• Finance
Image Credit: Stephen Copinger

10. THE VISIBILITY PROBLEM
Why is it hard to account for usage of cloud resources

11. DevOps on Visibility
• Tasked with sticking to a
budget
• “How much is this going to
cost me? How do I use my
budget responsibly?”
Image Credit: Joe Harrison

12. Enterprise IT on Visibility
• Tasked with minimizing waste
and optimizing usage
• “How do I tell who owns this
resource?”
Image Credit: Matthew Hawdon

13. Finance on Visibility
• Tasked with breaking down
the cloud bill and allocating it
across business units
• “How do I tell which business
unit is responsible for these
costs?”
Image Credit: Roy Verhaag

14. Overall the same problem
• Understanding cloud cost requires visibility on:
– The use case
– The resources
– Their associated costs
• Neither DevOps, IT, nor Finance have that visibility

15. Existing Solution
• Use metadata (tags) to track
resources and link them to
their use case and cost
Image Credit: Baabullah Hasan

16. Tags = extra workload
• Adding tags is more work
• Processing tags is more work
Image Credit: Wayne Middleton

17. Tags = inherently imperfect
• People forget
• Mandatory tagging is easily
circumvented
Image Credit: Maurizio Carpani

18. THE SAVING PROBLEM
Why is it hard to reduce cloud costs?

19. Finance on Saving
• Tasked with planning budgets according to cash flows
• With visibility, finance can define budgets for
organizational units

20. Enterprise IT on Saving
• Tasked with enforcing that business units stay on budget
• With visibility, IT can track effective usage against
budgets, and enforce those

21. DevOps on Saving
• Ultimately, DevOps engineers control the usage of cloud
resources
• With visibility on their budget usage, DevOps engineers
can identify areas for improvement

22. Overall, the same solution
• Solving the visibility problem enables saving

23. THANK YOU!