Apptio Brings Cloudability’s Leading FinOps Capabilities to Oracle Cloud

Apptio, an IBM company, is dedicated to bringing FinOps best practices and financial accountability to all corners of cloud spend. Accordingly, we are excited to announce full out-of-the-box cost management support for Oracle Cloud within the Cloudability platform. This includes class-leading capabilities to automate a full chargeback and provide single-pane-of-glass cost visibility across all public cloud spend.

Oracle Cloud: A growing footprint in a multi-cloud world

While the three major cloud providers — AWS, Azure, and GCP — are each continuing their impressive year-over-year growth, increasingly customers are looking to additional options like Oracle Cloud (OCI) to ensure they’ve got a comprehensive cloud solution at the best price. In fact, over 10% of our Cloudability customers are already running workloads on OCI.

Some of the key reasons driving this are the simplicity of migrating on-prem Oracle databases to cloud, the depth of services to build modern applications (including serverless, managed Kubernetes and ML), and consistently low prices across all regions. In conversations with our customers, we are seeing clear evidence of this growing adoption both for migrating on-prem workloads and provisioning net new cloud applications. 

A familiar set of FinOps challenges

It’s probably no surprise to anyone that users experience the exact same set of FinOps challenges with OCI as they do with the other public clouds. The variable, consumption-based spend model of this infrastructure combined with the fact that billing is typically consolidated at the organization-level means that it’s necessary to find ways to split these bills up, allocate the costs back to the business, and hold teams accountable for this spend.

Providing the foundation for this is Cloudability’s Business Mapping engine, which enables customers to define their exact rules for assigning costs based on a broad set of billing attributes. For OCI, important attributes for cost allocation include tenancy, compartment, and resource tags.

Figure 1: Defining allocation rules specific to OCI with Business Mapping

With Business Mapping delivering an automated showback or chargeback, the next challenge is finding ways to push visibility and accountability out to the delivery teams. For OCI, this can be achieved at scale using Cloudability’s rich dashboards and analytics, with stakeholders able to explore OCI spend alongside all other cloud spend in a single pane of glass. With this comes resource-level granularity and the ability to personalize views to each stakeholder or team.

Figure 2: Multi-cloud Cloudability dashboard with OCI cost visibility

To further push out financial accountability, Cloudability customers are already configuring budgets and notifications inclusive of OCI spend.

Some interesting details about OCI billing

With OCI being new to many practitioners, it’s worth spending time exploring its billing constructs and comparing them to the other cloud vendors. The first thing to note is that the billing export does report at the individual resource-level with hourly granularity, which enables us to produce detailed insights across all OCI spend. Here are some items to help familiarize yourself with OCI billing:

• The primary hosting construct is tenancy. This is comparable to AWS accounts, Azure subscriptions, and GCP projects.
• In addition to tenancy, OCI provides a scoping construct called compartment. This is comparable to Azure resource groups in that it allows users to organize and control access to their cloud resources. Compartment name and compartment ID are supported in Cloudability via tag mapping.
• Enterprise discounts are available through Oracle Universal Credits. The figures in the billing export are always the net cost with the discount pre-applied (similar to Azure and GCP).
• Similar to GCP’s custom machine types, OCI offers flexible shape VMs, which lets the engineer customize the provisioned VM’s allocation of memory and CPU. From a billing perspective, this is reflected in these VMs being charged across multiple billing lines for the underlying resources.
• Consistent with all the major cloud providers, resource tags are available. These key-value pairs offer the most flexibility in categorizing your resources.

Start your OCI cost management journey today

If you are a Cloudability customer that relies on Oracle Cloud, you can start leveraging Cloudability for OCI today by simply adding read-only credentials for your OCI tenancies. For more information on this process, please refer to our detailed guide on the Apptio Help Center. Please stay tuned as the Apptio product and engineering teams continue this innovation and launch important capabilities in the near future, such as rightsizing for OCI VMs.

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