5 Steps for Accurate Cloud Cost Attribution
Guangrui Fu, Technical Staff
We all agree that cloud-native has completely changed the way we build, deploy, and run applications. It has enabled developers to move quickly and meet end user needs at a speed unimaginable just a few years ago. Kubernetes adoption includes companies like Capital One, The New York Times, Adidas, and Pinterest – but that’s a minuscule number of the total k8s users. That number today is approaching 30K globally.
When we talk with customers, we hear a lot about the flexibility of cloud-native environments. How seamlessly their teams work together since deploying cloud-native applications, and how easy it is to get resources. But in every discussion we walk away with one common challenge: accurate cloud cost attribution.
All of this flexibility is great, until it’s time for planning. How do you allocate resources? How do you provision resources? And the question that every FinOps team wants to know, which team pays for all of these resources?
What we know is existing billing reports from cloud service providers provide a wealth of important information. SaaS products provide excellent observability into usage and aggregate costs. But taking all of this information and deciphering which team uses what application broken down by time, money, and overall application consumption— it’s manual. And as these environments continue to grow in complexity, they are prone to human error. Below we break down 5 steps to accurate cloud cost attribution and how to automate the process to reduce or eliminate cloud waste.
CloudNatix’s view of infrastructure and cost performance for Kubernetes specific workloads based on usage.
Five steps to accurate cloud cost attribution:
Evaluate compute costs based on usage metrics holistically. While most CSPs provide a great breakdown of cost, it’s not a holistic view. Workloads across a Kubernetes cluster can belong to different namespaces, organizations or other customizable categories. In order to get an accurate view, users need an accumulated view of workload costs. Users need a way to easily see this entire picture across dynamic workloads in real-time for the most accurate view of spend.
Second, once you have an accurate view of spending across dynamic kuberentes workloads, start to build segments by the most important attributions to your business. Different business units consume different workloads more than others. Oftentimes, their business hours also differ depending on the size of the organization. Building customized views by not just business units but also breaking down by cluster, organization, project, or region provides an accurate and robust view of just how much different groups are spending.
Consolidate the costs across your cloud providers. Consider multiple clusters and various types of workloads– VMs, K8s, and containers.
Review historical cost broken down monthly, weekly, daily, or even more granularly depending on the consumption and new usage patterns of your application. This context shows where most of your spend is coming from on a more regular basis.
Last, continuously evaluate spend. Depending on the time of year, or the prioritization of a specific product or project consumption changes over time fluctuating costs.
Are you interested in learning more about how cost attribution can eliminate your cloud waste? Schedule a CloudNatix demo today.
