VMware have a number of product development teams, some of whom utilize AWS, working to support our customers’ cloud initiatives by extending our on-prem offerings to the cloud. Recently, the R&D manager on one of these teams used a native AWS cost analyzer tool to obtain a cost estimate, prior to commencing development of a new product.
While the AWS cost analyzer provided some information on costs, it couldn’t provide an overview of the total cloud spend across all AWS accounts to be used for the new development. Instead, the R&D manager turned to Cost Insight, which provided the visibility across all AWS accounts required to obtain budget approval for the new product.
As is often the case with “born in the cloud” companies, the team’s cloud spend quickly overshot their budget. The DevOps ambassador, one of whose responsibilities was to monitor the budget, alerted the R&D manager when the monthly cloud spend spiking to more than twice the initial estimates. Using Cost Insight, the team were able to identify that the io1 SSD instances on the EBS service were underutilized, providing recommendations to move to EBS gp2 SSD instances.
More than 40 EBS io1 SSD instances were retired from one AWS account, and an additional 100+ EBS io1 SSD instances were retired from several more AWS accounts, resulting in more than 30% savings in the team’s monthly bill. In making these recommendations, Cost Insight took into consideration maximizing the storage utilization in i3 large EC2 instances that our internal customer had provisioned.
Additionally, Cost Insight’s recommendations also prompted the R&D manager to investigate the components of the applications used by EBS, through which they discovered that the ‘log’ and ‘boot’ partitions were using EBS io1 SSD instances. Upon analysis, the R&D manager determined that the team could move to gp2 SSD instances while retaining similar performance for these partitions. Another best practice for the team.
The above Cost Insight screenshot shows the savings recommendations in public cloud compute and storage instances. In addition to this view, Cost Insight also allows you to view a custom showback statement across multiple clouds by projects or user groups.
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