Mobile apps rely heavily on cloud storage in order to backup and store data, provide users with content and media, ensure that their data is secure, manage growing amounts of data when scaling, and much more.
As businesses scale and acquire more users, the amount of data that needs to be stored and managed increases. Additionally, as apps become more and more complex, they may require multiple cloud services. And, depending on the app, meeting regulatory and security standards often involves additional services and resources, such as encryption, backup, and monitoring tools.
What is one thing the statements above all have in common?
Each one leads to increasing cloud costs. In addition to the scenarios listed above, there are many other factors that contribute to today’s rising cloud costs. As cloud costs continue to increase, the need for an efficient cloud cost management platform grows.
To meet the growing demand for cloud cost management, new Cloud Cost Optimization (CCO) strategies and tools have emerged. One method for cloud cost management introduced by FinOps Foundation is called Multidimensional Cost Showback.
Multidimensional cost showback is a method of tracking and allocating cloud costs across various dimensions, such as resources, microservices, and tenants. It involves using data management tools to provide detailed insights into cloud expenditures.
This approach enables organizations to:
- attribute costs accurately
- optimize resource usage
- make informed financial decisions.
Key views include:
- Resource View (costs by ownership and usage)
- Microservice View (costs by service usage)
- Tenant View (costs by internal products and customers).
CCO tools are needed to gather and display the data needed for multidimensional cost showback.
One tool, CodeTuner for Cloud, is Product Science’s new cloud cost management platform that allows users to uncover hidden costs of endpoint calls to reduce their overall cloud spend significantly. CodeTuner for Cloud provides a 3D view of cloud costs through its endpoint analysis, method viewer, and user session context. Due to its unparalleled visibility compared to other CCO tools on the market, combining multidimensional cost showback with CodeTuner for Cloud provides a holistic approach to cloud cost management.
Multidimensional cost showback is crucial for tracking and allocating cloud costs because it offers detailed visibility into expenditures across different organizational dimensions. By utilizing Resource View, Microservice View, and Tenant View, organizations can accurately attribute costs based on ownership, usage, and business impact.
The Resource View in cost allocation focuses on tagging direct resources (like compute and storage) with their owning organization. This view allocates costs based on the resources' ownership and usage, emphasizing the responsibility of technology platforms to manage and optimize resource capacity, commitment levels, and right-sizing. This method ensures clear visibility into resource costs and promotes accountability for resource management decisions.
The Microservice View allocates costs based on the usage of microservices. Each microservice shares the cost of multiple cloud resources to provide specific capabilities. This cost is calculated proportionally using metrics like time or resource consumption. This view is important as it highlights the cost distribution among different microservices, enabling precise cost management and optimization for specific functionalities within the cloud environment.
The Tenant View in multidimensional cost showback allocates cloud costs to internal products and customers by associating expenditures with specific business units or customers. This view provides insights into the costs incurred by each tenant, helping organizations understand the financial impact of their cloud usage on different products or customer segments. By analyzing costs at this granular level, organizations can optimize pricing strategies, improve cost efficiency, and ensure fair cost distribution among various tenants.
The granularity of the information collected when implementing the views of the Multidimensional Cost Showback approach helps with identifying cost-saving opportunities, optimizing resource utilization, and making informed budgetary decisions. This ultimately leads to more efficient and effective cloud cost management. CodeTuner for Cloud is an essential means of collecting and displaying this information by providing unparalleled visibility into cloud costs down to the cost of a single function. By analyzing code-level events, CodeTuner gives insight into resource utilization and spending patterns.
Similarly to the Multidimensional Cost Showback method, CodeTuner for Cloud features three views:
- Dashboard View
- User Session View
- Trace View.
The Dashboard View provides a consolidated view of cloud spending and helps to understand the most expensive calls quickly. This is also where CodeTuner for Cloud provides notifications about spikes in resource usage and any unexpected behavior.
The user session view provides detailed insight into how API calls are utilized within specific user sessions. With CodeTuner for Cloud, clients can choose a particular API endpoint and view the user sessions where this API was called. Upon selecting a user session, CodeTuner for Cloud shows all API calls made during that session. The User View also shows a breakdown by Direct and Indirect calls. Direct calls are straightforward API requests, triggered synchronously by the user’s action, while Indirect calls are triggered asynchronously by some original Direct call. The Indirect calls normally create the most traffic and are the biggest contributors to cloud spending. While other CCO tools lack visibility into which particular code events contribute to these largest spendings, the User Session View provides insights into how costly APIs correlate with the user experience, helping to understand the impact of each API call on performance and resource usage.
CodeTuner for Cloud’s Trace View visualizes all code events executed during the user session that contribute to cloud costs, and highlights all the asynchronous dependencies between them. CodeTuner allows clients to capture all code events automatically, with no extra effort and no manual instrumentation. We use Machine Learning to find the optimal balance between capturing and showing everything that matters for cloud cost optimization while being sure not to overwhelm the view or impact performance. With CodeTuner’s capabilities, clients know which specific method is responsible for even the tiniest spending, as well as the logic behind its execution. Knowing this logic, clients can quickly reassess and optimize it - simply just click on any method on the trace file and see a chain of events that lead to triggering it.
Given the information outlined above, Multidimensional Cost Showback, combined with CodeTuner for Cloud, offers mobile apps the best solution to managing and reducing their rising cloud costs. Multidimensional cost showback provides detailed insights into where and how cloud resources are being consumed, while Codetuner ensures that these resources are used efficiently. Together, they offer a comprehensive view and control over cloud spending, enabling more informed decisions. Additionally, with cost showback, organizations can identify areas of high spending or inefficiencies. Codetuner can then be used to address these inefficiencies by tuning the cloud resources automatically, leading to immediate cost savings and performance improvements. Multidimensional cost showback also aligns financial reporting with operational metrics, while Codetuner aligns the technical performance with cost efficiency. This dual alignment helps organizations achieve both their financial and operational objectives. Lastly, the detailed reporting from cost showback can inform the tuning actions taken by Codetuner, ensuring that optimization efforts are targeted where they will have the most significant impact.
By integrating Multidimensional Cost Showback with CodeTuner for Cloud, organizations can achieve a balanced and optimized cloud infrastructure that is both cost-effective and high-performing. This synergy can lead to substantial cost savings and improved operational efficiency in cloud environments.
