In this episode, Bill explains how their organization went about the proof of value (PoV) for the Cloudability Cloudability, the most important criteria. Also, he describes the approach they took for preparing the exercise, and a glimpse on evaluating the results.
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“How is the proof of value for Cloudability coming along?” Bill was in his weekly one-on-one meeting with Rebecca Walker, the head of the TBM Office.
Scope and Set-up of the Proof of Value
“It’s going pretty well. As I reported earlier, we finally set up the required connectivity with two of the Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and we’ve been getting data for the last couple of months.”
“Just billing data?”
“Apart from that, the tool is pulling also consumption information.”
“What does it use it for, Bill?”
“The system needs to know about the resources we’re using to provide optimization insights and recommendations.”
“How did we organize the exercise?”
“We’re having weekly meetings with the vendor, focusing on the list of requirements and use cases we compiled prior to starting the evaluation process.”
“How did you put together that list?”
“We jotted some ideas in the TBM Office and posted it in our collaboration forum. We invited the members of the Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE), plus some architects and other members of the FinOps community to enter their expectations.”
“I suppose you shared that with the vendor…”
“Of course, Rebecca. I merged the requirements in a spreadsheet after eliminating duplicates. I also threw in some categorization, to arrange the entries logically. We then sent it to the vendor and discussed the list and their preliminary feedback in the first workshop.”
“What happened then?”
“They sent us back the list with some comments and recommendations. The vendor suggested we address some requirements in our TBM tool instead.”
“Why that, Bill?”
“They wanted to keep the scope manageable, by parking sticky points for a potential production implementation of their solution.”
“Wasn’t that cheeky?”
“Maybe we addressed the main contention point—handling shared costs in our PaaS platforms—during the workshops. The vendor tried very hard to accommodate our requests.”
“You said we’re only getting consumption data for two tenants for each of the CSPs in scope. Was that a problem?”
“Some participants considered a limitation having incomplete consumption data, however, the Cloud Management team insisted on restricting the scope. After all, the crucial point was figuring out what the product can do, and to what extent we could use it.”
“What’s the overall impression of the product, Bill?”
“This Cloudability is a suitable solution, particularly strong in multi-cloud environments. It has the definite advantage of coming from the same vendor as our TBM engine.”
FinOps Lifecycle Support
“To what extent would Cloudability help us achieve our FinOps goals?”
“This tool covers all phases of the FinOps lifecycle:”
- “Inform—via customizable dashboards and widgets, potentially tailored to each DevOps team, including benchmarking.”
- “Optimize—with its various utilities to manage Reserved Instances (RIs), commitments and the rightsizing engine. Also important is a dashboard to detect anomalies.”
- “Operate—linking Cloud spend to business value, and democratizing access to information and insights. It is still unclear how we would integrate Cloud spend with business metrics.”
“Is this your own analysis, Bill?”
“I tried to keep myself out of the comments. We organized a round of interviews with all participants, where we went through a series of questions I sent them in advance.”
“Sounds reasonable.” Said Rebecca. “Did everybody answer?”
“A few declined, mostly because they hadn’t really used the product. We ended up with a long list of names. You know how it works: someone thinks that the topic might interest someone else and they forward them the invitations…”
Shared Services
“You said that the impressions were mostly positive. Any downsides? You mentioned some limitations regarding our PaaS infrastructure...”
“True, the tool does not address our way of handling shared services. The stakeholders perceive this as a critical limitation. The tool designers had the concept that a line item in the billing data would correspond to a single tenant. For us, it might link to a set of other services.”
Bill continued: “the FinOps team has put together a set of scripts that interpret the dependencies between the PaaS infrastructure and the billing data.”
“What did the vendor suggest?”
“They tried hard. We had dedicated sessions on this topic, trying to upload the changed set of billing data, but we couldn’t work around the design restriction I just mentioned. As they had done when preparing the proof of concept, they suggested we do the final allocation in our TBM engine.”
“Are we so unique? Aren’t other companies out there doing this?”
“Apptio agreed to look for organizations that would have a similar approach. One of their senior engineers proposed a name. I’ll follow up with our account manager to arrange that meeting.”
“Isn’t this a KO criterion, Bill?”
“It is a serious setback, yes. However, it depends on how we want to deploy and implement FinOps.”
DevOps & FinOps
“Who’s going to be accountable for cloud costs, Bill?”
“So far, it has been up to the Cloud management team. We have just extended it to the CCoE. What’s going to be the role of the DevOps teams once we go full Cloud? We haven’t answered this question yet.”
“Didn’t we involve DevOps in this exercise?”
“We had sporadic contacts, Rebecca. The central Cloud management talks to the top account owners for budgeting & forecasting. Common feeling that we are early in the FinOps journey. Most DevOps teams lack awareness over cloud spend. Using the FinOps maturity framework, we’re just crawling.”
Budgeting & Forecasting
“How would Cloudability help us with budgeting and forecasting cloud costs?”
“The system allows loading different versions of budgets, thus supporting our concept of rolling forecasts. The software generates a forecast for future consumption based on proprietary algorithms and past data. Some participants wanted to know details about the logic—after all, they’re mostly software engineers—but the vendor wouldn’t disclose any details.”
Cloud Cost Management
“What about cost management? Arguably, this is why we would want such a tool.”
“Excellent question, Rebecca. The tool offers a true cost explorer utility, that presents detailed cloud spend information. You can slice and dice the information across multiple dimensions. Powerful.”
Fig. 1 - Cloudability True Cost Explorer
“Don’t CSPs offer such tools in their management consoles?”
“The general feeling of the participants is that, in this area, a third-party tool brings advantages compared to the individual Cloud Service Providers' native solutions. E.g. this one presents a wider selection of optimization recommendations.”
Fig. 2 - Cloudability's
Business Mapping Capabilities
“I attended a presentation on this tool. They said that they could map cloud costs to the business. Did you look into that, Bill?”
“Yes, that’s one of the first things we tried: mapping cloud tenants to applications. We decided it would be a good interface point between the FinOps and the TBM tools. From applications upwards, TBM would take over. There’s still the issue of multi-tenant line items, as explained before. We’re also limited by the current quality/volume of tagging. With the rates we have now, a good half of the cloud costs go to a collection bucket, meaning we don’t really know. This must improve.”
“And what are we doing about that, Bill?”
“The CCoE has spruced up the tagging policy, and they’re taking it up to the DevOps teams. They’re pushing to have the tag definition enforced by automation, but we still find tags such as Batman & Robin.”
Reporting
“I have played with some reports you pointed me to, Bill. What was the audience’s reaction to them?”
“I’m afraid participants experimented little with creating reports themselves. They said dashboards and reports are visually nice, more modern than in other comparable tools. Most liked the look and feel of the environment.”
“Anything else?”
“They liked the cash-flow reports. They also liked dynamic switching between actual and on-demand costs, a critical feature from our perspective.”
Vendor Support
“How well did the Apptio people do during the exercise?”
“Most stakeholders found them to be very professional. They were responsive & well organized, providing answers to questions and following up on items. Their account manager pulled specialists in whenever we had a specific discussion point, or a dedicated breakout session.”
“Did they provide any additional documentation?”.
“Yes, Rebecca. They pointed us to additional materials, such as videos and blog posts.”
Lessons Learned
“What conclusions did we derive from this proof of value, Bill? I need to put together a report for the leadership team.”
“In a nutshell, this Cloudability provides a single pane of glass for all Cloud Service Providers. Reporting is simple and powerful, and we can extend it in just about any way to suit our needs. There are customizable reports based on different categories (Owner, Subscription, Provider, Application, etc.) This would help with the democratization of data. Also, features like the cost explorer are really useful.”
“What about cost optimization?”
“With this engine we can adjust cloud spend. It provides five proposals per resource, with different degrees of savings, and associated risks. The vendor claims that most customers recoup the investment in Cloudability only with this feature. Looking at our data, the optimization engine reports a 15-20% savings potential only for two accounts for the last 30 days.”
Fig. 2 - Cloudability Rightsizing Recommendations
Next Steps
“What do you suggest we do next, Bill? You know that budget-wise we’re not covered.”
“The vendor wants to bring down the test instance we used for the proof of concept. This is not unreasonable. We probably want to buy some time. By when would we know the tool ecosystem to support FinOps?”
“I just talked to the Product Manager and they intend to include the FinOps toolkit in what they call Program Increment #5 in the SAFe jargon; that’s Q4 this year. What else should we look at, Bill?”
“Tagging levels are still low. The Cloud Migration program has established aggressive targets for the end of this year. We’ll have to see how the levels of tagging and their quality improve in the coming months. We would also need to enable consumption data collection for all accounts or subscriptions.”
“Anything else that comes to mind?”
“Although not directly related to the tool, but we should probably try Spot reservations, you know, stuff the CSP has lying around, unused.”
“On a different topic, Bill. What is the future of our TBM engine when we are fully on the cloud?”
“It depends on how we implement the allocation of costs to business layers in the cost model. I would suggest that FinOps concentrate on the lower layers, up to applications. From then on, TBM would take over, and proceed with the allocation to Services and Business Units.”
“What ideas or requests should we send to the vendor?”
“First, native support for Kubernetes/OpenShift. According to the vendor's roadmap, this is due in 2022. Also, integrating other data sources to support pre/post processing of billing and other data. Likewise, working together with open-source tools such as Prometheus, a likely future enhancement in the product.”
“Thank you, Bill. Very comprehensive review!”
“Thanks, Rebecca.”
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