Why is Cost Saving Insights as a service a necessity?

As and when the size & scale of the cloud infrastructure grows, the frequency with which the DevOps teams have to spend time & effort in ensuring a sanitized cloud environment increases proportionately. In addition to that – it becomes increasingly complex for DevOps teams to find all possible insights that are causing leakages in cost, usage, and performance. This results in the continuous accumulation of idle, unused, underutilized, and overutilized resources on the cloud. 

The major reason behind this accumulation is the lack of a near real-time continuous and automated analysis of the cloud environments. Consoles of cloud providers such as AWS, GCP or Azure are great to start with. But they give bare siloed, minimum, and delayed visibility to users that make the tracking of such resources a chore and ultimately they get often missed out. To solve this problem to an extent, DevOps engineers build homegrown tools. However, due to the continuous change in the architectures, cloud pricing models, etc. the homegrown tools require regular maintenance which is time consuming and somewhat boring work for DevOps engineers, so to speak 🙂

To address this problem of siloed visibility and lack of insights and automated remediations to fix the leakages, we are introducing Cost Saving Insights – a single pane of glass for all your leaky cloud resources, using which DevOps engineers can sanitize their infrastructure within minutes and without any manual effort in place.

Building Blocks of Cost Saving Insights

Visibility & monitoring as features & concepts are present in several products in the market but they do not address the actual problem of the user which is to save their time & effort in finding the insights from the visibility available from disparate sources. In addition to that – the visibility and corrective actions provided by other products are mostly similar to what we can easily find in cloud consoles itself. The key is to provide in-depth root cause analysis which a DevOps engineer can actually use as an insight which otherwise would have required a lot of time and effort from his/her side if done manually.

We built Cost Saving Insights with a core understanding that the user should be able to find all the information in the most precise manner to do root cause analysis of cost, performance, and usage leakages from one single place. The reason we set this as a benchmark is that people have so much to do every day, and our solution to the problem should require the least time and effort of a DevOps engineer to get things done. To make this experience possible we have consolidated all the data regarding the resources in a single dashboard instead of showing in-depth analytics through multiple dashboards.

With the help of the Cost Saving Insights dashboard, you’ll be able to see what are the resources that are unused/idle/underutilized in your environment and are contributing to higher costs, without any significant usage in the specified history of time. You can see every detail of such unused resources down to the resource id so you know what exactly to close/delete from your environment. On the contrary, users can also identify the resources which are consistently high on the consumption of system resources and can crash anytime if not supplied with more capacity. 

In the case of underutilized resources, we give you minute details about the particular resource so you can make an informed decision regarding it. You can look at the performance of individual resources through a graph and a weekly/monthly timeline showing the breakdown of the utilization of that resource. You get insights to downsize/delete the resource with factual data.

Cost Saving Insights make root cause analysis a breeze as it enables you to take quick actions or remediations by ensuring the performance, reliability, and stability of the systems.

Benefits to DevOps Engineers and Engineering Teams

Cost Saving Insights by OpsLyft gives you transparency to the cloud environment and helps you find the leakages of the cloud and all possible solutions instantly at your fingertips. Following is the summary of the benefits you can achieve by using this feature:

• It provides the reason for the leakage along with the idleness period, potential cost impacts, and impact on the stability of associated applications with it. 
• Deep integrations with JIRA & Slack, that enables you to prioritize the cloud sanitization work in the development workflows.

• You get the historical context of your leaky resources with respect to utilization, cost patterns, deployment frequencies, etc. so that you can make informed decisions while taking any action on them.

• In addition to insights on leakages, Cost Saving Insights publishes the possible solutions or quick fixes that can be implemented right away. This saves additional time for DevOps engineers to think of solutions to the problems post the investigation effort.

What’s next for Cost Saving Insights

We want to stay true to our core value proposition of building this feature i.e. to save as much time and effort of DevOps engineers as we can. In order to do that, we need to find ways to provide built-in automation as remediations for the identified leakages as insights, which currently are published as recommended solutions only. Also, we want to make sure that while building automation, the infrastructure security is not compromised at all. Also, we believe that if we can show the impact associated with each automation when it’s executed, it should completely automate the entire DevOps lifecycle of sanitization of the cloud environments. 

If you want to try Cost Saving Insights, just schedule a demo with us and we will give you a complete walkthrough of it and tell you more about how it can benefit your organization.

If you like it, it will be up and running in your environment within 48 hours of you signing up with us. Feel free to contact us for other DevOps related queries at contact@opslyft.com.

We will be ready with more DevOps magic in the coming weeks so do come back when you get the time!