Cost control in a multicloud world - part 2

This post is the second part of a discussion about optimization of the cloud budget and cost control in your IT organization. The first part is here.

The CloudCenter Suite

The CloudCenter Suite is a key component in this framework: it is made of three modules that offer provisioning, lifecycle automation and – what we are discussing here – cost control.

The Cost Optimizer module collects data from the API of all the cloud providers to create a series of detailed reports, that you can use to understand where and why you spend your money. You can slice and dice the information across different dimensions, and you can schedule reports or download them to feed a billing system.

complete and granular reporting of cloud spend

You can create any custom organizational hierarchy to map your business (departments, customers, projects, etc.) and give them visibility and responsibility of the budget consumption.

custom hierarchy of cost groups

budget management

The Cost Optimizer gives you recommendations for rightsizing, wherever your assets are deployed, analysing their behavior. You can evaluate the suggestion and then act manually, or you can enable the tool to do it for you automatically.

recommendations for rightsizing and other optimizations

It will also tell you when it makes sense to adopt reserved instances to get a discount, showing you how much you’re going to save.

Act now to reduce your spending… across all clouds

The best practices and the tools are there. You can choose among tools that are specific to a cloud provider (they all offer good solutions) or a cloud agnostic solution that works with all clouds.

With the Cisco CloudCenter Suite you get a fully detailed report of your inventory, all the services you are consuming everywhere, and the efficiency from a budget standpoint.

You also get actionable suggestions to save money that can be, if you configure the tool to do so, executed automatically. If you prefer, you can just get the list of suggested actions and implement them manually.

Thanks to the Cisco CloudCenter Suite you can setup a common governance model and a set of policies in one place, instead of replicating the build of reports and automation in every single cloud, based on full visibility that goes beyond the suggestions given by your service providers.

All you have to do now is to download and test the CloudCenter Suite (30 days trial), or contact us for a live demo or a discussion of your use cases.

Cost control in a multicloud world

Using public cloud is not as cheap as you expected?

Is allocating budget and verifying spending a little more difficult than they had told you?

You’ll probably find some best practices and tools for cost control in public cloud services, described in this series of two posts, useful to improve the efficiency of your consumption. They apply to every IaaS and PaaS service in a multicloud context.

What CxO expect from IT

Surveys show that the enterprise IT is getting a predominant role in front of the lines of business when they need cloud services. Not just to select the best solution for them, but to help keeping the financial aspects in control (source: RightScale State of the Cloud Report).

role of enterprise IT in cloud decisions

Looking at the initiatives, that is where budget is allocated, cost control and cost saving is on top:

Allocation of budget for cloud initiatives

Like drug dealers

Cloud providers are making a lot of money. And, of course, they want more customers and they want to retain the existing ones. Competitors steal some, and others just fly away when they realize that operating applications in production is more expensive than they had thought.

So, they offer you some candies, just to taste what a beautiful trip they can offer you. Even with a free account, you get amazing services that work very well. See also Azure and Google. They all make building business applications quick and easy.

appealing services offered by AWS

Developers are attracted by that, and they love creating cloud native applications using PaaS services. But they do not realize, or they just don’t care of, how expensive it will be to run applications in production.

In addition, they generate a lock-in because PaaS services are not portable across clouds.

Is public cloud easier or is it cheaper?

Now ask yourself this question: do you use the public cloud because it’s easier or because it’s cheaper? Or maybe you’re just lazy and you want to delegate the SLA responsibility to the service provider?

I will not discuss if it’s easier in this post. But, for sure, it’s not cheaper. Budgets go out of control very often.

Those are some tips from Amazon (source: AWS re:Invent2019)

tips for saving from AWS

Of course, cloud providers want to help you to be efficient but… not too much! The two green actions look like the most effective, now let’s see if we can do anything better.

Cost control framework

We could create a cost control framework, as the large company I took this information from.

cost saving framework

We focus mostly on two aspects: avoidance of unnecessary costs and iteration of the improvement actions.

In the avoidance best practice, we concentrate on the efficiency of VM snapshots retention: how many and how long. Storage volumes and public ip addresses should be monitored, because they generate a cost. When you use a S3 storage you can optimize the cost based on frequency of access, speed and size. And VM should not be larger than need, because you pay also the capacity in excess.  Suspending VM at night, in the weekend or whenever the business application is not used, also saves money. And so does scaling capacity dynamically

You should monitor the situation carefully, and automation helps here. You can setup alerts and governance policies, having reports sent to the stakeholders. Automation in provisioning, but mostly in reporting and resource adjustment is key.

You can obtain important savings

This is what cost optimization saved in the context of a large SaaS service operations. Most of the saving comes from adoption of reserved instances where appropriate and from cleaning environments used for proof of concepts. The total saving is $7M per year.

savings from cloud optimization

And this is what they are planning: choosing the right instance types, rightsizing, cleaning up will save $7M more per year.

expected savings from recurring optimization

Cost control: a solution

We will examine a simple 3 steps process to save your budget.

1. Understand your assets and ecosystem
2. Optimize based on best practices, on investigation through your assets or... recommendations from a tool
3. Avoid unnecessary costs and iterate of the improvement actions

Easy principles to set a governance model are:

• Define (and enforce) budgets for your customers, projects and departments.
• Monitor and report about that.
• Set policies to automate suspension, autoscaling and cleanup.

Cisco offers a solution that helps you to achieve all that, quick and easy.

We have built a framework that is based on the feedback loop suggested by best practices (e.g. the second principle of DevOps recommends looking at the entire system as a whole and iterating the optimization).

the optimization loop

In next post you will find a solution for implementing your cost control quickly and consistently across all the clouds you use: any combination of private cloud technologies and public clouds, with no need to adopt specific solutions for each individual target.

Keep reading, it will prove useful for your strategy.

Teaching Alexa to deploy applications in any cloud

Alexa, deploy a webserver in AWS and a database in Azure!

Recently I presented a session at Codemotion Milan, with my colleague Stefano Gioia.

We demonstrated how the API exposed by the Cisco CloudCenter Suite can be easily integrated from within an Alexa skill.

Of course, this is not something you would do in the real life in a production environment 🙂

But it’s an easy and funny way to show how easy the integration is, and we found it attractive for our customers and partners.

Instead of Alexa you could use any client, like a custom script from the command line, a workflow engine, a web portal or a ITSM system like ServiceNow to achieve the same result.

Any program that can do a REST call can drive CCS (CloudCenter Suite) externally to orchestrate the lifecycle of a software deployment.

In case you use Alexa, you will code the REST client logic in the serverless implementation of the “skill” that is executed as a Lambda function. You can use different languages to create the skills: we chose node.js for the demo.

We decided to show some basic CCS features like deploying any kind of software in any cloud, or measuring the cost of all the services we are consuming in all our clouds (for running VM and containers, for consuming cloud services like load balancers or network bandwidth, for running serverless functions. etc.). Of course there is much more in the product, but we wanted to keep the demo light and funny.

The 3 modules of the Cisco CloudCenter Suite

Everything you can do in the CloudCenter web portal can also be done through its REST API, and the CCS documentation shows examples you can easily reuse and adapt.

These are the API targets, for the different modules, that we used in the implementation of the skill:

Suite Admin API

/suite-idm/

E.g.: https://na.cloudcenter.cisco.com/suite-idm/api/v1/tenants

Workload Manager API

/cloudcenter-ccm-backend/api/v2/apps

E.g.: https://na.cloudcenter.cisco.com/cloudcenter-ccm-backend/api/v2/apps

Action Orchestrator API

/be-console/

E.g.: https://na.cloudcenter.cisco.com/be-console/api/v1/workflow

Cost Optimizer API

cloudcenter-shared-api

E.g.: https://na.cloudcenter.cisco.com/cloudcenter-shared-api/api/v1/costByProvider?cloudGroupId’

Next picture shows the high level process that allows a user to get something done by Alexa, just by speaking to a Echo device or to the Alexa mobile application.

The speech recognition system translates the user’s voice to text, then the “intent” of the user is matched to one of the functions available in the skill. Skills and their intent are executed based on patterns and keywords that the system is able to recognize in the natural language, thanks to machine learning algorithms.

Recognizing an intent triggers your custom code, that is generally a Lambda function (the Amazon developer console makes it easy to write the code and to host it in the Lambda service, providing also reusable examples). The outcome is rendered as audio or, depending on the device, also as a video.

In our specific demo, we put the client code for the Cisco CloudCenter API in the serverless implementation of the intent.
These are the commands that we can give Alexa:

• give me the list of existing tenants
• list all configured target clouds
• deploy a database or a web server in a cloud
• show current cost of all cloud services

Here you can see a sample of the capabilities of Alexa when it calls the Cisco CCS API:

Building a new Alexa custom Skill: as the skill developer, you have to:

1. Define the requests the skill can handle
2. Define the name Alexa uses to identify your skill, called the invocation name
3. Define the utterances and input variables, called slots
4. Write the code to fulfill the request
5. Test it from the developer console or from your Alexa device

The documentation at the Amazon Developer console contains excellent tutorials to build Alexa skills.
You can learn easily to create a Hello World skill, then you are ready to incorporate the client code to call the CloudCenter Suite API.
Stefano has published his examples in github here, feel free to test it yourself.

This demo demonstrates that it's easy to build a client to drive the API exposed by CCS.
And it helps positioning the CloudCenter Suite as a mediation layer in your architecture, to orchestrate the lifecycle management and to define a governance model including cloud cost control.