What are the best ways to communicate cloud computing costs?

1) Understand usage Patterns and forecast Future needs. 2) Identify the unauthorized applications. 3) Platforms like Microsoft you can use the reserved instances for virtual machine .Monitor the High utilization virtual machine and try to reduce the utilization and cost . 4) Eliminate the unused Elastic IP Address. 5) Right Size for your computing resources.

We can establish a systematic approach to account management by conducting monthly reviews, during which we'll set a budget threshold at 80% of the total allocated budget. This proactive measure ensures that we closely monitor expenditures and allows for timely adjustments if needed. Furthermore, periodic reviews will be implemented, utilizing the native tools available in AWS or Azure. These tools enable us to generate detailed and granular-level reports, providing insights into resource utilization, cost distribution, and any potential areas for optimization. This comprehensive strategy aims to enhance cost control, optimize resource allocation, and ensure efficient cloud budget management.

Other than these metrics, Utilization Rate would be another aspect to take into consideration as far as communication of cloud computing costs are concerned. Utilization rate reflects how efficiently resources are used in the cloud, offering insights for cost optimization. Proper analysis of this stat helps to recognize underutilized resources, optimize allocation, and demonstrate cost-effectiveness to stakeholders. So, integrating utilization rate as a clear metric that enhances decision-making and cost management.

Um exemplo de métricas na computação em nuvem com Azure é o Azure Monitor. Ele oferece insights sobre o desempenho e a utilização dos recursos na nuvem, como tempo de resposta de um aplicativo, CPU de uma máquina virtual, e taxa de transferência de dados em armazenamento. Com alertas configuráveis, é possível detectar e resolver problemas proativamente. Por exemplo, alertas podem ser configurados para notificar sobre alta utilização de CPU, evitando interrupções no serviço. Essas métricas garantem eficiência e confiabilidade nos serviços Azure.

1) Provide clear and detailed breakdowns of costs, including resource usage, data transfer, and storage. 2) Utilize cost allocation tags to attribute expenses to specific projects or departments for accountability. 3) Implement cost visualization tools and dashboards to offer real-time insights into spending trends. 4) Regularly review and optimize resource utilization to minimize unnecessary expenses. 5) Offer transparent cost forecasting and budgeting to anticipate future expenses and plan accordingly.

Uma maneira eficaz de comunicar os custos na computação em nuvem é por meio da visualização de dados. Por exemplo, utilizando o Azure Cost Management + Billing para criar relatórios e gráficos que mostram as tendências de gastos ao longo do tempo, destacando padrões e áreas de oportunidade. Com essa abordagem, os usuários podem facilmente entender e comparar os custos entre diferentes serviços e recursos do Azure, permitindo uma gestão mais eficiente e transparente dos custos de nuvem.

DX is an evolution and requires a disciplined approach for app rationalization and modernization. Continue to align those costs to business value; while a daunting task, it's worth continual review if you want to achieve long term success.

📈 Data visualization is a powerful tool for understanding complex information and communicating insights effectively. In the context of CI, visualizing data such as build and test results, code quality metrics, and deployment status can help you quickly identify trends, patterns, and anomalies. Visual dashboards and reports make it easy to monitor the health of your CI/CD pipeline, track key performance indicators (KPIs), and make data-driven decisions to improve your software delivery process. Visualization also enhances collaboration and communication among team members by providing a shared understanding of the data.

Beyond metrics, effective cost communication leverages the power of visualization. Imagine transforming raw data into compelling charts, graphs, and dashboards. These visual elements unveil trends, patterns, and anomalies in your cloud spending, empowering clear comparisons across time, providers, services, and resources. Further engagement comes from strategic use of colors, icons, and labels. Think of highlighting cost spikes, identifying underutilized resources, or showcasing cost-saving opportunities – all within a glance. This transparency empowers stakeholders to grasp the intricacies of cloud spending, fostering informed decision-making and collaborative optimization.

alizing cloud computing data is crucial for insights into performance and costs. Cloud provider consoles, such as AWS CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, and Google Cloud Console, offer built-in dashboards. AWS Cost Explorer and Azure Cost Management provide cost-focused visualizations. Third-party tools like CloudHealth, Datadog, and New Relic offer multi-cloud monitoring and analytics, with customizable dashboards. Grafana and Prometheus are open-source options for creating flexible visualizations. Kibana, part of the ELK Stack, specializes in log analysis and visualization. The choice depends on factors like integration, ease of use, and scalability, often leading to a combination of tools for a comprehensive view of cloud resources.

Clear and Transparent Pricing model: • Use a straight forward pricing model that is easy to understand. • Clearly outline the components that contribute to the overall cost, such as compute resources, storage, data transfer, etc. • Provide forecasting tools to estimate future costs based on current usage trends.

Uma maneira eficaz de gerenciar e comunicar os custos na computação em nuvem é por meio da criação de orçamentos e previsões utilizando ferramentas como o Azure Cost Management + Billing. Por exemplo, você pode estabelecer orçamentos que definem os gastos esperados e limites máximos para cada serviço e recurso do Azure, além de alocar e justificar os gastos em diferentes unidades de negócios ou projetos. Além disso, é possível criar previsões que estimam os custos futuros com base nos padrões de uso atuais e prever economias potenciais por meio de otimizações na nuvem. Essas práticas permitem uma gestão mais eficiente e transparente dos custos, alinhada com a estratégia e metas da organização.

Effective cost communication in cloud services is crucial for informed decision-making. This entails providing stakeholders with a transparent breakdown of costs, including details on services utilized, pricing models, and additional charges. Cost estimation tools offer stakeholders the ability to input their usage requirements and receive estimates of associated costs, facilitating better planning and budget allocation. Comparative analysis further enhances cost communication by benchmarking cloud costs against on-premises solutions or other providers, enabling organizations to make data-driven decisions about their cloud strategy.

💰 Managing resources effectively is essential for delivering software efficiently. By creating budgets and forecasts for your CI/CD initiatives, you can allocate resources wisely, prioritize investments, and avoid cost overruns. Budgeting helps you estimate the costs of infrastructure, tools, and personnel required for CI/CD, while forecasting allows you to anticipate future needs and plan accordingly. By aligning your budget and forecasts with your business goals, you can ensure that your CI/CD efforts deliver maximum value to your organization.

Just remember, if you sneeze, you pay for it. Put a box around the spend, start with something measurable, observe, tweak, then, go full-bore on your road to innovatation.

Implementing cost transparency is what will help you align your costs with your business goals. First, you'll want to allocate cloud spend to specific apps/cost centers. You can do this with account boundaries (individual workloads/groups of workloads in their own AWS accounts), or with tagging, or both. Account boundaries are often best since they're easy to set up & keep up to date, & provide other benefits like simplified IAM policies, limiting blast radiuses, & helping to avoiding service limits. You can always add tags in addition if/where you need more granularity. Finally, show this data to the wider org, f.e., by sending weekly reports that show each app/cost center's run-rate, along with how these costs are trending over time.

Para alinhar os custos com as metas de negócios utilizando o Azure, é possível vincular os gastos com nuvem aos resultados desejados pela empresa. Por exemplo, você pode demonstrar como os serviços do Azure contribuem para a melhoria da experiência do cliente, aumentando a eficiência operacional ou impulsionando a inovação. Ao vincular os gastos com a nuvem aos objetivos de negócios, é possível comunicar de forma eficaz como esses investimentos são relevantes e importantes para o sucesso da organização.

🚀 It's important to align the costs of your CI/CD initiatives with your overall business goals. This involves understanding the value that CI/CD brings to your organization and ensuring that the investment in CI/CD is justified by the benefits it provides. By aligning costs with business goals, you can prioritize initiatives that deliver the most value, optimize resource allocation, and demonstrate the impact of CI/CD on your organization's bottom line. Aligning costs with business goals also helps you make strategic decisions about scaling your CI/CD efforts and investing in new technologies.

It's important to get rid of the mindset that "cost" is bad. Most people tend to think of ways to cut down on the cloud costs by giving plethora of reasons. However, when your customer experiences an application outage, poor responsiveness etc. then they quickly move away to the next available product/offering from the competitors and the cost of this customer loss (and the subsequent cost of a new acquisition) outweighs the cost spent on the cloud. You simply cannot create the best product, best customer experience etc. and still try to say that you spend the least on cloud infrastructure. Set realistic business goals and do the math. If you're compromising on the cloud costs, then, you're inevitably making a trade-off elsewhere.

In a retail e-commerce scenario, strategic cloud spending drives tangible business outcomes. Investments in scalable cloud resources enhance the website, improving customer experience & conversion rates. Analytics & personalization tools boost engagement & average order value. Scalability ensures uninterrupted service during peaks, directly impacting revenue. Cloud enables cost-effective innovation, fostering agility & competitiveness. Global expansion contributes to increased market share. Granular revenue tracking ties cloud investments to revenue generation. Innovative tech enhances market differentiation. Regular analysis establishes a clear link between cloud spending & measurable business outcomes, ensuring strategic alignment.

Uma coisa que achei útil foi organizar workshops no Azure para educar as partes interessadas sobre os conceitos básicos da computação em nuvem e demonstrar como o Azure pode ser usado para otimizar os custos. Esses workshops proporcionaram uma compreensão prática dos recursos e ferramentas disponíveis no Azure para gerenciamento de custos

🤝 CI/CD is not just about tools and processes; it's also about people and culture. Educating your team about CI/CD best practices and fostering a culture of collaboration are key to delivering software efficiently. By investing in training and development, you can ensure that your team has the skills and knowledge required to implement CI/CD effectively. Collaboration tools and practices such as pair programming, code reviews, and cross-functional teams can help you leverage the collective intelligence of your team and drive continuous improvement in your CI/CD process. Education and collaboration enable your team to work more efficiently, share insights, and innovate together.

Effective communication extends beyond mere data presentations. Building trust and alignment on cloud costs necessitates ongoing education and collaboration with stakeholders. Imagine empowering them with knowledge of cloud fundamentals, its inherent benefits, and potential challenges. By demystifying these elements, you foster informed decision-making and shared understanding. Collaboration takes center stage through open dialogue. Envision jointly establishing policies, guidelines, and standards for cloud spend, ensuring alignment with organizational goals. Encourage active participation in identifying and resolving cost-related issues or opportunities.

->Understand Your Audience: Tailor your communication to the audience. Executives may be interested in high-level cost summaries, while technical teams may need detailed breakdowns. Customize your approach based on their roles and responsibilities. ->Collaborative Budgeting Sessions: Engage in collaborative budgeting sessions involving key stakeholders. Discuss cloud spending in the context of business goals and align budgets accordingly. Encourage input from different departments to ensure comprehensive planning. ->Share Success Stories: Share success stories where cost optimization efforts directly contributed to positive business outcomes. Use real-world examples to illustrate the impact of effective cost management.

Collaboration tools have been game-changers. We use dashboards that track our spending in real-time, allowing everyone to see the impact of their work on our cloud costs. It's about creating a culture where everyone feels responsible and empowered to optimize cloud usage. Remember, a well-informed team is your best asset in managing cloud costs effectively.

Always be flexible - see what you can do better. Get creative with Reserved Instances, Continuous use discounts and other public cloud specific money savers.

🔄 CI/CD is a journey, not a destination. It's important to continuously adapt and improve your CI/CD process to keep pace with changing requirements, technologies, and market conditions. By regularly reviewing your CI/CD practices, gathering feedback from stakeholders, and implementing lessons learned, you can identify areas for improvement and make incremental changes to optimize your software delivery process. Adaptation and improvement also require a willingness to experiment, take risks, and learn from failures. By embracing a culture of continuous improvement, you can stay agile, resilient, and competitive in today's fast-paced software development landscape.

Communicating cloud computing costs effectively is akin to navigating a vast ocean, it requires a captain who's not only adept at steering the ship but also at adjusting the sails as the wind changes. In my experience, transparency and continuous improvement are key. I once led a team through a cloud migration where we adopted a dashboard approach, displaying real-time usage and costs. Remember, clear communication and willingness to adapt are your best navigational tools in the cloud cost sea.

Establish systematic ways to collect feedback from stakeholders regarding existing comm. methods. Schedule regular meetings with key stakeholders to discuss their evolving needs & preferences. Adopt an agile approach to comm. planning, allowing for flexibility & quick adjustments. Identify & utilize communication channels preferred by different stakeholder groups. Treat communication strategies as iterative processes that can be refined over time. Foster an environment where stakeholders feel comfortable providing feedback & actively seek their input. Launch pilot communication programs with a subset of stakeholders to test new methods or channels. Utilize metrics & analytics to assess the effectiveness of different comm. methods.

From my experience, introducing a collaborative review process lets everyone share ideas for constant improvement. This ensures our messages are clear, relevant, and benefit from the collective input of our team.

- Drill down details: Granular breakdowns, cost allocation tags, and real-time dashboards clarify where costs are going. - Connect costs to value: Align spending with business goals, like improving customer experience or boosting revenue, for clear justification. - Engage & adapt: Educate stakeholders, involve them in decision-making, and adjust communication methods based on their needs.

one of the tools that can be used is CloudZero. Get creative with Savings Plans which are a flexible pricing model that allows organizations to enjoy lower than on-demand pricing, in exchange for a one-year or three-year specific usage commitment

Empower engineering teams to allow them to own their costs. Cost, like Security, should be a non-functional requirement which is thought through from Day 0. The cost to build and run on the cloud can quickly go out of hand if we don't keep a close eye on the trade-offs with the design decisions. FinOps practice should be there to support and democratize, however the ownership and keeping a tab on costs should lie with the engineering teams.

Cloud cost management is, fundamentally, an aspect of operational excellence across the entire engineering organization. Any work that betters cross functional communication, clarifies intent, reduces technical complexity, and makes system interactions more clear and obvious will have a direct line impact to cost -- both in dollars spent and time served.