I’m going to take a wild guess and assume you are using some sort of public cloud today. Whether it’s IaaS, SaaS, or PaaS, public cloud use is ubiquitous in today’s enterprise.
While most organizations strive to gain visibility a lot of wasted resources and loss of control can be a big issue. In other words, a lack of governance.
What is cloud governance?
Cloud governance is managing your cloud presence to best optimize the cloud resources to curb overspending and wastage. Aligning the right resources for the right applications is critical to a better cloud strategy.
To best use cloud governance to keep your resources in check make sure you:
- Stay proactive not reactive
- Identify waste in your public cloud environment
- Keep tagging tidy in your cloud environment
Governance should be a proactive step taken to achieve an organization’s goals. However, most of the organizations have a reactive approach towards governance. This can lead to complexities that grow with the size of IT environment. If not controlled, a lack of governance practices can lead to downtime and resource wastage. From engineering team perspective this can mean resource sprawl, low return on investment (think: your project gets shut down!) and failure to standardize.
VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth provides a solution that engineering organizations can use to govern their environments, in a relatively hands-off fashion. Organizations of various sizes from different industries have benefited immensely from the governance capabilities that VMware Aria Cost provides. Let’s talk about how you can use governance to keep your cloud resources in check and rightsize your environment using automation.
Identify waste in your cloud environment
With VMware Aria Cost, you can create policies to ensure consistency and optimization in your environments. Policies are conditional statements that notify you or take an action when certain conditions are met. The consistency that they bring helps you standardize the processes for various activities. For instances, you can ensure that when CPU, memory, network and disk resources dip below a certain threshold the owner gets alerted, or you can delete the EC2 Instances automatically or stop the instance. This makes sure that you drive the required simplicity through consistency in your environment. A quick snapshot of this policy is shown below.
Keep tagging tidy in your cloud environment
You can use these policies for many different use cases and can develop conditions to meet your organization’s unique requirements. For example, one of the common issues that engineering teams face is assets with missing tags. In the picture below, you can see that I have set multiple conditions in the same policies. This helps you drive more rigor through a single policy, if you intend to. This also ensures that your day-to-day management processes are more predictable and you can spend less time worrying about tagging and more time building.
With these governance policies, you can create checks and balances to drive visibility and be more proactive before things go out of hand. Of course, these are role based policies so that only the designated user (IT Admin or IT Manager) can approve actions to rightsize the environment. Thus, you have a tighter control on what happens within your environment.
VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth can arm you with the required information to make better decisions. We know that engineering teams are stretched thin and are always looking for ways to free up more time to drive game-changing initiatives that they are interested in. Through our platform, you can streamline your environment and keep it under your control without compromising flexibility of cloud.
