CloudKeeper: Help Enhance AWS Cloud Operational Efficiency

cloudkeeper

As businesses march through challenging times, increased demand for Cloud Cost Optimization has emerged. CloudKeeper has been successfully helping many organizations enhance their operational efficiency, by providing substantial savings on their AWS spends and helping them make intelligent business decisions using valuable data insights.

CloudKeeper is an end-to-end AWS FinOps solution by TO THE NEW that provides cloud cost savings, software for resource monitoring, and services, all bundled in one unique offering while maintaining the security of the AWS accounts of the customers. As a result, Cloud Cost Optimization has become easier! With CloudKeeper, savings kick in instantly from day one, without any commitments or lock-ins. There is no catch!

The three key aspects of CloudKeeper are :

  1. Guaranteed Savings
    • TO THE NEW – a premium AWS Cloud Partner enables CloudKeeper to provide attractive guaranteed savings of 5-15% from day #1.
    • Reserved Instance pricing for all On-Demand usage.
    • CloudKeeper bears all the risks and claims no upfront fee from the customer. It demands zero commitment and zero lock-in.
  1.  CK Lens: CloudKeeper’s AWS analytics software, CK Lens, can help in monitoring and managing a company’s AWS Cloud spends. It will give you a comprehensive view of your infrastructure usage costs, optimization points, billing breakups, daily cost usage, and more. Also, companies can benefit from the 90-day free trial of CK Lens to kick-start a journey of monitoring and analyzing the usage and ensure efficient AWS deployment at all times. After the initial trial, they will charge just 0.5% of a monthly AWS bill for continued use. Some of the insights are as follows:
  • Billing Summary: Get insights into your AWS bill summary, average daily spend, and last 7-days cost, along with monthly forecasts & daily cost breakup on AWS services.
    • EC2 & S3 Spend Evaluation: Understand the data transfer charges for all the EC2 instances and identify the ones costing maximum. Deep dive into your EC2 & S3 spends and get the usage quantity & costs for on-demand, reserved, and spot instances.
    • Daily Cost Breakup: Heatmap shows the cost variation for the month daily. Drill down further to identify specific usage types for AWS service for any sudden increase/decrease in the cost.
    • Previous Month Comparison: Get insights into the cost variation over the last four months. Drill down further to identify specific usage types for AWS service for any sudden increase/decrease in the cost.
    • Cost Optimization: With the increasing use of Cloud computing globally, many companies that rely on it adopt Cloud cost awareness and optimization strategies to understand and manage the charges associated with their usage of different services.
  1.  Evaluations & Audit
    • Periodic support & optimization guidance
    • Spend evaluation by AWS certified technicians
    • Actionable acumens with context-based analytics

Importance of Cloud Cost Awareness

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is attractive for the on-demand availability of services and the ability to deploy resources at the click of a button. Changes in an organization’s Cloud instances or Cloud presence are inevitable. Besides, AWS provides a plethora of options to choose from, and in case you accidentally select a service for the wrong use-case, you might end up spending more. Therefore, understanding different cost levers for any service will help you build a robust & cost-efficient setup on AWS.

  • Building Cloud Cost Awareness: It is essential to create a step-by-step plan to build an ecosystem that keeps all stakeholders aware of the incurred costs. A cloud cost awareness plan serves as a tangible representation of the process and a template for budgeting and managing costs.
  • Build an accountable chargeback mechanism: In this phase, first, ensure that you have identified and implemented a tagging strategy that adds a business context to your usage. The tagging function enables you to determine keys and values applicable to categorize, filter, and sort resources. For instance, you can tag your stocks based on the application name, owner, environments, project, and cost center.
  • Implement a tool for the engineering teams to drill down on the cost: Companies should implement analytical tools like CK Lens to examine their Cloud billings and resource utilization to find optimization avenues.
  • Ability to implement cost deviation alerts: This is one of the important exercises in the cost optimization process. It can help you identify the bugs/cost anomalies within days rather than through monthly bills. The teams should set up alerts based on the specific thresholds, cost deviations by a certain percentage.

Conclusion

With CloudKeeper, companies will have an excellent mechanism to identify any cost anomalies and act on them promptly. This system will help you gauge cost on different parameters & help you build cost-aware teams. Cost optimization is an ongoing process & should be made part of your existing DevOps processes.