Apptio Cloudability: 2021 Innovation Recap

2021 was a year marked by accelerated digital transformation. Cloud adoption not only sped up, it took over as the new operating model for organizations pivoting their strategies to take advantage of market opportunities. At Apptio, we partnered closely with customers to ensure our solutions and key innovations were designed to turn their cloud strategies into competitive advantages while effectively managing their cloud program spend and finding opportunities to optimize along the way.

The Cloudability product, design, and engineering teams released 44 innovations in 2021, including a product design facelift, a key integration with Atlassian’s Jira Service Management/Jira Software, and two major new product launches. Along the way, we were thrilled to be named a leader in the 2021 ISG Provider Lens™ Public Cloud – Services & Solutions (Multicloud FinOps Platforms) global report.

In case you missed any of our announcements (it was hard for us to keep up too!), here are some of our most notable 2021 highlights:

Welcome Cloudability TotalCost and Cloudability Shift to the family!

Cloudability expanded its portfolio and the coverage of cloud program spend with the release of Cloudability TotalCost and Cloudability Shift.

Cloudability TotalCost is a new solution that connects direct and indirect cloud charges, including public cloud spend, cloud services, applications, labor, and shared costs, to calculate the complete cost of running cloud-based applications. This tool enables users to get accurate visibility into the portion of costs that their organization’s teams, departments, and services are responsible for; allocate costs to the appropriate teams; and establish comprehensive cloud unit economics.

Cloudability Shift is a modern cloud migration planning solution designed to extend cloud financial management capabilities to help organizations migrate confidently to the public cloud.

A fresh, fully integrated user experience

Providing a seamless user experience between Apptio products, Cloudability’s updated design came with a few notable performance enhancements like enabling customers to create reports more quickly and faster load times within the product. Additionally, user documentation was consolidated within the Apptio Help Center with a handy side navigation and search, making it easy to locate Cloudability and other Apptio documents.

Recommendations to boost your AWS Savings Plans discounts

Since Savings Plans were launched by AWS to help cloud consumers reduce hourly rates via committing to ongoing levels of spend, they’ve become hugely popular. This is no surprise given how flexible this instrument is and how it simplifies the purchasing process compared to Reserved Instances. On the flip side, it does become more difficult to understand usage that qualifies for commitments, predict future patterns, and assess the likely impact of additional purchases.

With Cloudability’s AWS Savings Plan recommendations, users can tailor recommendations to organizational preferences by analyzing usage within relevant date windows and setting minimum thresholds for savings and utilization. Detailed visualizations let users understand their current commitment position and further saving opportunities against applicable historical usage patterns.

Intelligent rightsizing for Google VMs and persistent disk

Cloudability now offers rightsizing recommendations for Google Compute virtual machines and persistent disks, a leading-edge feature for Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Based on hourly-level analysis across all key utilization metrics, Cloudability-generated recommendations include multiple cost-saving options for each resource, providing engineers the insights needed to optimize with confidence.

Control Kubernetes costs and optimize usage with rightsizing recommendations

The rapid adoption of containers for deploying software applications has added complexity to cloud financial management. Containers are typically deployed within Kubernetes clusters that in any given month can be backed by thousands of ephemeral cloud resources. As a result, many cloud customers do not have a shared understanding of what each cluster is costing day to day, let alone a reliable mechanism to split out these costs so they can be charged back to the business or optimized for efficiency.

With this release, Cloudability has fully integrated container cost management for an accurate chargeback and rightsizing recommendations to help drive efficient usage, helping users maximize the business value realized from Kubernetes investments. By following these recommendations, customers can repurpose freed capacity for additional workloads and reduce the underlying cloud footprint to achieve up to 30% in savings.

Policy-driven rightsizing

Building on our partnership with Atlassian, we worked to help mutual customers address the biggest unsolved pain point identified by FinOps practitioners in the 2021 State of FinOps report: getting engineers to act on optimization recommendations, and in turn, improve the economics of running cloud. With the launch of Policy-Driven Rightsizing, a closed-loop integration between Cloudability and Atlassian’s Jira Service Management/Jira Software, enterprises can now manage the full lifecycle of rightsizing tasks and seamlessly measure impact without making engineers leave the tool they work in most frequently.

What’s next in 2022

Looking ahead, our team is working to drive more value and leading-edge innovations to market. We’ll keep finding new ways to better support our customers as we continue to advance cloud financial management practices and apply the FinOps discipline more comprehensively to the cloud ecosystem. Stay tuned to our blog or Apptio Community for updates — we have lots in store!