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FinOps for AWS

Cost Allocation Measurement and Accountability with HYMDL​

Cost Allocation Measurement and Accountability is essential for establishing cost visibility and ensuring accountability for cloud spend within an organization. Effective cost allocation strategies enable organizations to monitor, report, and optimize their cloud expenditures, ensuring that each business unit or department is responsible for their cloud usage and costs.

HYMDL, as an AWS Partner solution, provides a comprehensive set of features to meet the requirements of cost allocation measurement and accountability. Here’s how HYMDL addresses these needs:

  1. Support Cost and Usage Report (CUR) Integration: HYMDL integrates seamlessly with the AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR), providing granular cost and usage reporting. This integration allows organizations to gain detailed insights into their cloud expenditures.

  2. Filtering and Grouping of AWS Costs: HYMDL enables filtering and grouping of AWS costs by various dimensions such as organization, account, resource type, tag, cost category, and AWS Region. This flexibility helps organizations understand their cloud spend across different areas and allocate costs accurately.

  3. Mechanisms to Measure and Monitor Cloud Spend: HYMDL provides robust mechanisms to measure and monitor cloud spend, creating accountability for those responsible across the organization. These tools help ensure that each department or business unit is aware of their cloud usage and associated costs.

  4. Support for Customer Cost Allocation Models:

    • Alignment to Account Structures: HYMDL aligns with the customer’s account structures, ensuring that cost allocation is consistent and logical across the organization.
    • Automated Governance of Cost Allocation Tagging Schema: HYMDL establishes and reports on the use of business-relevant cost allocation tagging schema. Automated governance ensures that the tagging schema is followed consistently for showback/chargeback purposes.

  5. Creation of Unit Economics: HYMDL helps in creating unit economics for the customer’s AWS bill, providing insights into the cost per unit of service. This capability is crucial for understanding the cost efficiency of different services and making informed financial decisions.

  6. Support for Cost Allocation of Shared Service Costs: HYMDL supports the cost allocation of shared service costs, ensuring that expenses for shared resources are appropriately distributed among the benefiting business units.

Optimize Cloud Costs Through Resource Optimization with HYMDL​

Optimizing cloud costs is a critical aspect of cloud financial management. HYMDL, as an AWS Partner solution, provides a comprehensive suite of tools and capabilities designed to help organizations achieve significant cost savings through resource optimization. Here’s how HYMDL addresses these requirements:

  1. Instance Utilization Analysis: HYMDL identifies EC2 and RDS right-sizing opportunities by analyzing key utilization metrics such as CPU, Network I/O, Disk I/O, and Memory utilization. This analysis ensures that resources are appropriately sized for their workloads, preventing over-provisioning and under-utilization.

  2. Instance Family Recommendations: HYMDL recommends optimal instance types across all available AWS instance families, including newer generation instance types and higher performance chipsets like AWS Graviton. This ensures that customers are using the most cost-effective and performant instances for their workloads.

  3. Usage-Based Elasticity: HYMDL leverages historical usage patterns to implement elasticity and scheduling. This means resources can be automatically scaled up or down based on actual demand, ensuring that costs are minimized during periods of low usage and resources are available when needed.

  4. EBS Volume Optimization: HYMDL recommends transitioning to newer generation EBS volume types, such as moving from GP2 to GP3, which offer better performance at a lower cost.

  5. Snapshot Optimization: HYMDL provides user-configurable EBS snapshot optimization and cleanup, ensuring that unnecessary snapshots are removed, and storage costs are minimized.

  6. Resource Identification and Mitigation: HYMDL identifies and mitigates unattached, idle, or orphaned resources, including Elastic IPs, EBS volumes, Amazon RDS databases, Amazon Redshift clusters, unused VPCs, and load balancers without attached targets. This ensures that organizations are not paying for resources that are not in use.

Leveraging GenAI for Cost Optimization​

HYMDL leverages advanced Generative AI (GenAI) technologies to enhance resource utilization and cost optimization. By inputting resource utilization data and AWS resource cost data, HYMDL's GenAI models provide precise and actionable recommendations. These models analyze the complex interplay between different resources and their usage patterns to suggest optimal configurations and cost-saving measures. Additionally, HYMDL incorporates a "shift left" approach by providing cost estimates based on design documents before development starts. This proactive strategy allows organizations to anticipate costs early in the project lifecycle, enabling better budgeting and financial planning. The advantages of shift left cost recommendations include reduced financial risk, improved project planning accuracy, and the ability to make informed decisions about resource allocation before incurring significant expenses.

Planning and Forecasting with HYMDL​

Effective planning and forecasting are essential for managing cloud costs and ensuring financial predictability. HYMDL, as an AWS Partner solution, provides robust capabilities to help customers forecast their AWS service usage and costs accurately. Here's how HYMDL establishes customer forecasting and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis:

1. Bottoms-Up Forecasting:

Net New Workloads: HYMDL employs a bottoms-up approach for forecasting new workloads. This methodology involves estimating costs based on detailed specifications and anticipated resource requirements for each new project. By analyzing design documents and projected usage patterns, HYMDL generates accurate cost estimates before development starts. This shift-left approach helps organizations budget and plan more effectively.

Demand Driver-Based Forecasts: HYMDL also incorporates demand driver-based forecasts, which are based on unit economics. This method involves analyzing the drivers of demand, such as user growth, transaction volumes, or other business metrics, to predict future cloud usage. By understanding these demand drivers, HYMDL provides forecasts that align closely with business growth and operational needs.

2. Predictive Cost Estimates:

Linear Regression and Other Modeling Techniques: HYMDL utilizes advanced statistical techniques, including linear regression and other modeling approaches, to provide predictive cost estimates. These models analyze historical usage and cost data to identify trends and patterns. By applying these insights, HYMDL predicts future costs on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis, offering customers a clear view of their financial outlook.

3. Historical Cost Trend Analysis:

Trailing 12 Months (TTM) Analysis: HYMDL performs historical cost trend analysis by examining the most recent trailing 12 months (TTM) or more. This analysis provides insights into past spending patterns and identifies areas where costs have fluctuated. By understanding these trends, HYMDL helps customers identify potential cost-saving opportunities and anticipate future expenses more accurately.

Advantages of HYMDL’s Forecasting Approach​

Proactive Cost Management: HYMDL's shift-left approach, which provides cost estimates based on design documents before development starts, allows organizations to anticipate and manage costs proactively. This reduces financial risk and improves budget accuracy.

Informed Decision-Making: By providing detailed forecasts and historical trend analysis, HYMDL empowers organizations to make informed decisions about resource allocation and financial planning. This leads to better alignment between cloud spending and business objectives.

Increased Accuracy: The combination of bottoms-up and demand driver-based forecasting, along with advanced modeling techniques, ensures that HYMDL's forecasts are highly accurate. This accuracy helps organizations avoid unexpected costs and better manage their cloud budgets.

Cost Optimization: Through continuous monitoring and refinement, HYMDL helps organizations identify cost-saving opportunities and optimize their cloud spending. This leads to more efficient use of resources and significant cost reductions over time.

Hybrid Cost Visibility with HYMDL​

Hybrid Cost Visibility is essential for customers running infrastructure in multiple clouds or workloads with components across various cloud providers. HYMDL, as an AWS Partner solution, offers comprehensive capabilities to provide a consolidated view of all cloud costs, enabling efficient monitoring and control from a central location. Here’s how HYMDL addresses these requirements:

Key Capabilities for Hybrid Cost Visibility​

1. Integration with Multiple Clouds: HYMDL integrates seamlessly with AWS and Azure for granular cost and usage reporting. It also supports importing data from other cloud providers such as GCP, OpenShift, RedHat, Oracle, and VMWare. This ensures that customers have a comprehensive view of their cloud expenditures across different platforms.

2. Consolidated Dashboards and Reporting: HYMDL provides consolidated dashboards and reporting features that allow users to filter, group, and drill down into their imported cloud costs. This unified view simplifies the monitoring of cloud expenses and facilitates efficient cost management.

3. Cross-Cloud Cost Allocation: HYMDL supports cost allocation groups for workload components that reside in different clouds. This includes typical cost allocation groupings such as projects, products, and services, enabling customers to allocate costs accurately across various cloud environments.

4. Consistent Tagging Strategy: HYMDL promotes a consistent tagging strategy that can be applied across different cloud providers. This ensures that all resources are tagged uniformly, making it easier to manage and track costs.

5. Unit Economics for Consolidated Spend: HYMDL helps in creating unit economics for the customer’s consolidated spend across multiple clouds. This provides insights into the cost efficiency of various services and helps in making informed financial decisions.

6. Shared Service Cost Allocation: HYMDL supports the allocation of shared service costs across clouds, ensuring that expenses for shared resources are distributed fairly among the benefiting business units.