Whenever you log online, there’s some kind of cloud service that you are using whether you realize it or not. In this modern do it as you go world cloud technologies have played a pivotal part in paving a path for companies to deploy their products and services in the fastest way possible.
Cloud has been deeply integrated into the infrastructure of most of the organizations in the world especially when it comes to tech companies. But cloud can’t be all rosy and bloomy, right? There has to be something that itches and infuriates organizations that most common folks don’t know about. The culprit here is cloud bills.
Major cloud providers are really smart when it comes to the billing structure of the cloud. They have a pay-as-you-go model which is hard to keep track of when things reach an enterprise scale. This results in cloud bills reaching millions of dollars leaving companies puzzled as the bills and their native cost explorers don’t give a clear picture of the reasons that accumulate such massive bills.
We realized this lack of information and built our product combating the two major problems faced by organizations i.e., lack of visibility and quick action. Our product focuses on providing industry-leading visibility of your AWS costs down to the cost incurred by the smallest instance. For taking prompt action on the things causing a surge in cloud bills we have built our Plutus CLI so the developers can focus on developing more and debugging less. We have built the following to help you cut down your cloud costs:
Account Summary Dashboard
This dashboard is made for executives that want to have a holistic view of their AWS account and get a good amount of information without fiddling with a lot of data. You get an idea of your AWS costs and what steps you need to take to control them if the cost is more than what you expected. Account Summary Dashboard provides you with the following metrics:
- All the accounts ‘ summarised details on a single screen.
- Trend for the account’s cost for a brief on how the cost is looking out to be through the month.
- Get the top 5 costliest service forecasts for day, week, and month.
- Operational details to know the cost of the top five resources of basic services that are driven in real-time.
- Determine the cost wasted on idle resources which could be avoided further.
- Track down the cost of untagged resources which can be highly beneficial to track down unexpected costs.
True Cost Explorer
True cost explorer is our approach to the various native cost explorer tools out there. The biggest problem with the native cost explorer was the lack of clarity as you can’t get a clear picture of the reason you are getting such massive cloud bills. The metrics provided by them can’t help pinpoint what needs to be done to curb the bills.
We made a cost explorer that provides everything you need when it comes to “exploring” your AWS account. The benefits of our true cost explorer are the following:
- To make the tracking of cloud costs easy we have segregated the costs into different categories namely cost of each service, account, region, instance type, usage type, API operation, and resource id in a single screen reducing monitoring time of the user. You can go as deep as you want to explore your AWS costs.
- We don’t force a particular view for the cost explorer which may restrict or overwhelm your cost analysis. There are a number of filters in place so that you can slice and dice data however the user may like and decipher your cloud costs according to your needs.
- With our True Cost Explorer, you can even keep track of cost for an individual resource.
Idle Resource Coverage Dashboard
One of the biggest culprits of cloud costs is the idle resources that are running in the background. The resources are hidden from plain sight and hardly anyone pays attention to them. These resources keep churning up your cloud bills and you realize it when it’s already too late.
The main challenge with idle resources is they are hard to back trace when you have a big infrastructure. The time that goes into searching for such resources and shutting them down can be instead used to develop more features and products. We thought of this and made an idle resource coverage dashboard that can help the developers by:
- To help keep track of cost wastage the dashboards have an idle resources count tab which tells you how many idle resources are there in your AWS account and in addition to that, you get the total cost of these idle resources that are adding up in your bill per day.
- So far we cover-up detailed data for cost wasted in EC2 service namely Elastic IP addresses (EIP), Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Elastic Block Storage (EBS), and underutilized EC2 instances.
Untagged Resources Dashboard
Tagging is considered one of the most fundamental principles of good engineering practice and organizations abide by it with full pride. But as the company grows and the resources increase even efficient tagging is hard to practice no matter how much you try.
Untagged resources have a significant contribution to cloud bills and in a plethora of processes and activities going on, they get lost and are forgotten till you get your AWS bills and you think about what contributed to it. To solve this problem we made our Untagged resources dashboard that:
- Identifies the resources which are not tagged but still contributes to cloud cost which solves the challenge to track down unexpected cloud cost.
- The Detailed dashboards help you track untagged resource cost by service down to individual resource level.
Root Cause Analysis Dashboards
The problem with data provided by native cost explorers is the delay between data collection and when it’s actually displayed on the dashboard. This gives you a vague idea of the resources that are causing a cost surge and by the time you take an action, the metrics have already changed. We combat this issue by providing real-time data for up to 5 minutes so you can take action before it’s too late.
We have made our RCA dashboards that are your go-to for solving issues without looking for data at a number of places. RCA dashboards are designed are in such a way that:
- They solve the limitations of AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Cloudwatch by providing cost data down to the very last instance.
- They monitor anomalies in cost and performance for basic services in real-time to avoid unexpected cost spike or server crash.
- They provide a detailed cost breakdown for every cost affecting variable or static action for the service in real-time.
- They provide detailed performance metrics in real time.
- Cost and performance metrics can be tracked even to the resource level for the service.
Plutus CLI
There are many other cloud cost management tools out there in the market which also provide a number of dashboards to customers. Even though these dashboards are useful to finance teams and top management, these don’t serve a good enough purpose to developers. They get an idea where the cost is rising or which particular service/account is behaving inappropriately, but they don’t have a way to solve that problem quickly and have to sit and solve the issue with rigorous effort.
We realized this pain-point and developed our Plutus CLI that empowers developers to take quick actions and solve problems as soon as possible so they can focus on developing more. We have built our CLI with the following features keeping developers in mind:
- We have a built-in action set to track and avoid unwanted resources and potential cost optimizations.
- We give developers the freedom to list and remove all the potential cost optimization opportunities and unused resources just through command lines.
- The engineering team can set up a custom configuration driven alert management system driven through the command line to keep a check on unwanted cost spikes.
- You will get notified whenever the cost is increased through the user-defined threshold at the service or resource level.
- You can even deploy a YAML configuration and also check alert history through the command line.
We are just getting started with our product and will keep adding features as we move forward. Our current product is deployed at Innovaccer, Niki.ai, etc. and we have helped them save more than $300k in cloud bills already. If you want to know more about our product and how we can help you cut down your cloud costs feel free to fill the form below so we can give you our product demo.
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