Tested In Practice: How  Companies Can Halve The Costs For Public Cloud

Public cloud spending is hitting new record highs yearly, and overall, cloud infrastructure makes up the lion’s share of many organizations’ IT budgets. Alexander Zschaler, Sales Manager Germany at Cloudera, explains how this reduces unnecessary expenses and halves costs.

Public cloud spending will reach a notable $500 billion globally in 2022 for the first time. A value that illustrates how much companies are struggling with rising costs. This fact prompted the CEO of the cloud specialist Cloudera to set an ambitious goal for his company: the annual public cloud costs should be halved from USD 25 million. To this end, a three-point plan was drawn up:

A First Overview

The main cost driver is waste. According to a 2021 survey of companies, 82 percent are significantly overspending on the cloud, and 86 percent cannot keep an overall view of these expenditures, including Cloudera itself. However, a complete overview of costs is essential to gain an overview. This is the only way to develop a suitable strategy and take the proper measures. Due to the complex requirements, Cloudera decided after the first analysis to break away from external SaaS providers and develop its automation solution based on CDP Data Warehouse in-house.

NimbusWatch – Record And Allocate Costs Automatically

Cloudera’s new solution, NimbusWatch, ingests data directly from the public APIs of the big three cloud providers. This saves license costs and leads to faster, reliable, and detailed data collection. In addition, human resources and financial systems data can be transferred to map the organization as a whole. The individual items in consumption and the costs incurred are divided into the following categories:

• Cloud account (at Cloudera, for example, there were 200 cloud accounts, most of which can be assigned to a cost center)
• Object owners that can be set to an organizational unit and thus to a cost center
• Tags – A company-wide tagging process allows costs to be reassigned if necessary
• Identify Waste – Dedicated dashboards track patterns in data usage and provide actionable information to help those responsible initiate conversations or directly reach out to the right team to make changes and eliminate waste.

Prepare And Forward Analysis Clearly

The next step is transforming the mined and assigned data into measurable cost savings. To do this, the analyses still have to be prepared formally and forwarded to the right competence center. Only then can they derive effective measures from the data. For this purpose, NimbusWatch automatically sends weekly reports to the technical managers via e-mail. These show the evolution of cloud spending and waste and highlight potential for improvement or savings. Such statements help managers proactively manage costs and alert teams to expenses incurred promptly instead of reacting at the end of each month.

The Goal Of Halving Costs Achieved

Despite cost pressure, companies cannot do without the advantages of the cloud. With NimbusWatch, the Cloudera team was able to develop a suitable tool for this challenge. This allows all public cloud spending to be proactively monitored and managed. The strength of the solution lies in the fact that it processes previously highly complex and distributed data into precise analyzes and reports and enables users to take responsibility for their cost management through quickly actionable insights. In this way, the project team at Cloudera was not only able to achieve the ambitious goal of halving the costs for its public cloud infrastructure but even exceeded it.

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