How does Cloudability Workload Planning work?

Workload Planning helps you optimize your workload architecture and improve your financial planning accuracy across cloud vendors.You can:

• Model your workloads.
• ·    Get a resource recommendation and cost estimate for a set of service types (virtual machine, managed database, object and block storage, load balancer) based on your requirements.
• ·    Get estimates for one cloud vendor or compare resources between cloud vendors to pick the optimal cloud destination

What business needs does this feature address?

Here are the top use cases for customers using Cloudability's Workload Planning feature:

1. Pre-Deployment Cost Estimation and Comparison:

• ·    Comparing Cloud Providers: Customers can model the cost of a planned workload across different cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI etc.) to determine the most cost-effective option for their specific requirements. This is crucial for multi-cloud strategies.
• Evaluating Region and Resource Types: Before launching, users can compare the cost implications of deploying a workload in various regions and using different resource types (e.g., different VM families, storage options) to find the optimal configuration.
• ·      Scenario Planning for New Projects: Engineers and product managers can quickly estimate the cloud infrastructure costs for new applications, services, or features, allowing finance teams to understand the budget impact and make data-driven investment decisions.

2. Optimizing Existing Workloads (Rightsizing and Replatforming):

• ·    Rightsizing Analysis: By inputting existing workload requirements, customers can see recommendations for more cost-efficient instances or services that meet performance needs without over-provisioning. This helps eliminate waste from idle or underutilized resources.
• ·    Leasing Option Analysis (Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, Spot): Workload Planning helps customers understand the cost savings associated with different leasing models (On-Demand, Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, Spot Instances) and guides them in choosing the most appropriate option for predictable or interruptible workloads.
• ·    Migration Planning: When planning to migrate an application from on-premises to the cloud, or between cloud providers, Workload Planning can simulate the costs in the new environment, ensuring a financially sound migration strategy.

3. Collaborative Budgeting and Forecasting:

• ·      Shared Understanding of Cloud Costs: The ability to save, share, and comment on workload plans fosters collaboration between engineering, FinOps, and finance teams, creating a shared understanding of upcoming cloud spend.
• ·      Accurate Forecasts: By using Workload Planning to estimate future deployments, customers can build more accurate and defensible cloud forecasts, reducing variance between planned and actual spend.
• ·      Accountability and Ownership: When teams are involved in the planning process and can see the cost implications of their architectural decisions, it promotes a greater sense of accountability for cloud spend.

4. Strategic Cloud Resource Procurement:

• Informed Purchasing Decisions: Workload Planning provides the data needed to make intelligent decisions about purchasing commitments like Reserved Instances or Savings Plans, ensuring they align with actual workload needs and maximize discounts.
• Identifying Opportunities for Cost Reduction: By modeling various scenarios, customers can proactively identify opportunities to consolidate resources, leverage different pricing models, or make architectural changes to reduce overall cloud spend.

5. Compliance and Governance:

• ·      Standardizing Resource Provisioning: Workload Planning can help establish best practices for resource provisioning by providing a clear, cost-optimized path for new deployments, contributing to better cloud governance.
• ·      Tracking and Reporting Planned vs. Actual Costs: While not a direct reporting feature, the plans created in Workload Planning serve as a baseline against which actual cloud spend can be measured, aiding in performance monitoring and identifying deviations.

In essence, Cloudability's Workload Planning empowers customers to move from reactive cost management to proactive financial planning, enabling them to make strategic decisions that optimize cloud spend from the outset.

3. How do I configure my Workload Planning preferences in Cloudability?

Workload Planning preferences apply to all workloads created by your organization. 

Preferences allow FinOps teams to centrally define, and restrict options in . Any update is optional, and not required to use .

By default, these preferences are only visible to Admin, who can modify them. “WorkloadPlanningPreferencesViewOnly” permission can be assigned to a custom role to allow non-admin users to view Preferences without editing rights.

Instructions

1. Navigate to Settings > Work . Planning Preferences .

2. For each service provider, adjust parameters based on your organization preferences and policies, and click Save . Any change will take effect immediately.
3. The parameters set in Settings > Work . Planning Preferences will reflect under Common Information > Service Providers section

Preference Details

4. Why should I choose the cloud vendor and purchase preferences under Common Information > Service Providers?

You choose the cloud vendor and your preferred lease types and commitment types under Common Information > Service Providers so that you will get more refined recommendations based on these preferences set here.

5. How many regions can I select under Common Information > Service Providers? Why should I select them here?

You could select up to 5 regions for each cloud vendor, based on which you will get recommendations for pricing in each of these regions

6. Why am I not able to see my desired Lease Type or Commitment Type under Common Information > Service Providers?

This could be because you admin may have opted out those Lease Types or Commitment Types from the Work.Planning Preferences section.

7. Why am I seeing this message while editing an existing workload?

This Workload Does Not Comply With Workload Planning Preferences

The lease types and/or commitment preferences set by your administrator do not match with your workload. You can click 'Edit Workload' to update them.

This could be because some of the constructs defined in your workload (eg: cloud vendor, lease type, commitment type etc.) have been updated by your admin from Work.Planning Preferences section

8. How does the feature recommend resources if I don’t choose the exact resource type (use the search by resource type option) while adding a new resource?

If you haven’t chosen the exact resource type (use the search by resource type option) while adding a new resource, the feature would recommend the top cost efficient 30 resources across each selected cloud vendors based on the resource configuration you input.

How does the feature recommend resources if I choose the exact resource type (use the search by resource type option) while adding a new resource?

If you have chosen the exact resource type (use the search by resource type option) while adding a new resource, the feature would pin that specific resource at the top as the first recommendation, followed by cost efficient 29 resources across each selected cloud vendors based on the resource configuration you input. 

10. What should I do for the resource recommendations to account for my EDPs or other custom pricing?

You need not do anything for the resource recommendations to account for your EDPs or other custom pricing. Cloudability already pulls your custom pricing information if exists and the discounts would be baked into Workload Planning recommendations by default.

Do I need to set my organization’s custom pricing in the Additional Discount / Uplift % field Work.Planning Preferences section?

No. Cloudability already pulls your custom pricing information if exists and the discounts would be baked into Workload Planning recommendations by default.

Additional Discount/Uplift % is for any other discounts that apply to the costs of all recommended resources, excluding Other costs. When set, this discount/uplift would be added on top of any existing custom pricing already surfaced by Cloudability

12. Why am I seeing a difference in the prices in Workload Planning recommendations from the cloud vendor’s pricing calculator?

If you see a difference in the prices in Workload Planning recommendations from the cloud vendor’s pricing calculator:

1. Check whether the resource type, region and other configurations are exactly matching between the pricing calculator and Workload Planning
2. Check whether you’ve logged into the cloud vendor’s pricing calculator using your organization’s account that has custom pricing enabled. If you’re checking without logging into the cloud vendor’s pricing calculator, you’re likely seeing retail prices in the calculator and custom prices in Workload Planning
3. Check whether your admin has set any additional discounts that apply to the costs of all recommended resources from Work.Planning Preferences section