As an AWS user, you know how important it is that your organization understands what you’re spending and why. AWS is a tremendously powerful resource, and when you have complete visibility into the cost efficiency of your AWS environment, you can use it to remove many of the scaling obstacles that companies faced in the past.
The most common way for AWS users to account for their cloud spending is through tagging: the manual process of associating each resource with the product or service it’s supporting.
Tagging gives organizations precious information about their cloud infrastructure —but it’s not an entirely failsafe system. Depending on how your infrastructure is configured, there are tagging challenges that can limit your visibility — and ultimately, your ability to build cost efficiently in the cloud.
That’s why we built CloudZero CostFormation®: the industry’s only code-driven method of allocating AWS costs. CostFormation® gives organizations complete visibility into their AWS costs, and maximizes the ROI of their AWS investment.
Here’s how …
1. Corrects Tagging Typos
Mistakes happen, especially when you’ve got [hundreds] of resources to tag. For example, it’s common that an engineer would tag one resource “production” and another resource “prodcution,” intending them both to be associated with their production costs.
CostFormation® can identify slight variations in spelling and create logic that essentially corrects them, collecting all of those costs in the same production bucket. Having identified the typos, CostFormation®also gives your team the option to go back and correct the misspelled tags —whenever it’s convenient to you (that is, when it doesn’t inhibit innovation).
2. Normalizes Slightly Different Notation
Similar to the typo issue, engineers might accidentally label one resource “prod1” and another “prod-1,” again intending for them to fall in the same production bucket (or sub-bucket). Again, CloudZero CostFormation® can identify these discrepancies, and create logic that unifies the resources tagged this way.
3. Unifies Different Tagging Frameworks
Sometimes, organizations are faced with different tagging frameworks for the same group of underlying resources. This can happen because of personnel shakeup —one team leader likes resources tagged one way; their predecessor liked it a different way —or during mergers and acquisitions, where previously separate companies had different methods of tagging the same group of resources.
CloudZero CostFormation®can identify these discrepancies and create logic to unify the different frameworks — with minimal effort on the part of the customer. Then, whether you continue to use one of the frameworks or create a new one, CostFormation® can integrate future tags with that master group.
4. Allocates Shared/Multi-Tenant Resource Costs
One of tagging’s greatest foes are shared and multi-tenant costs — when multiple teams, products, customers, features, etc. use a single resource, and there’s no way to tag the resource in a way that reflects their true costs.
Many platforms solve this challenge through averaging: dividing the resource’s total costs by its total number of users, and assigning the average cost to each user. But this rarely reflects the truth. Different users always account for different levels of cost — and the difference can be dramatic.
CloudZero solves this by combining your billing data with usage data: business- and system-level telemetry that tell us exactly how much each user is using a given shared or multi-tenant resource. We use real usage data to automatically break down shared costs with precision —not with estimates.
Container costs. This is especially important for container costs, such as those associated with Kubernetes. The elasticity and ephemerality of container costs makes them hard to allocate, and to unify with the rest of your cloud spending. CostFormation® solves both of these challenges, giving you complete visibility into your container costs, and integrating them with all other sources of cloud spending in a single pane of glass.
5. Allocation Framework Flexibility
Times come when an organization wants to alter the way it allocates costs. Team restructuring, sunsetting or combining products or features, and adjusting SaaS metric calculations are all activities that could warrant grouping the same cloud resources under different headings.
CostFormation® provides complete flexibility in how you allocate your costs. The logic it uses to allocate can be amended, expanded, or adjusted at any time, meaning you’re never locked into any single allocation framework.
Make Your Engineers Proactive Cost Managers
Tagging will always be of central importance to AWS users. CostFormation® makes it easy to identify tagging gaps, correct them, unify disparate frameworks, and add total flexibility to how you visualize your AWS costs.
With complete, real-time visibility into 100% of their AWS costs, engineers can take a proactive role in cloud cost management. CostFormation® gives them relevant, timely data about the cost to build and run their cloud infrastructure —making it easy to prioritize cost efficiency as they work.
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