New Cloudability Features to Help You Solve Key FinOps Challenges

Challenging economic headwinds are accelerating the shift to public cloud and subsequently, a rise in FinOps adoption to manage growing cloud costs. As a result, FinOps practitioners are pushing the boundaries of “what’s possible” in cloud cost management and, frankly, pushing their tooling to solve new and novel challenges. These practitioners are now well into their cloud adoption journey and are maturing beyond basic cost management — the future is about scaling optimization activities, producing dependable plans for future spending, and driving value with every dollar spent. Practitioners are embracing this change but need additional support from FinOps platforms to advance their practice beyond the basics.

Apptio Cloudability consistently sets the pace of innovation for FinOps solutions, and we are proud to announce high-value innovations released throughout the first half of 2023. We focused our product investments on multi-cloud optimization, cloud planning, and new expansion to help better support the evolving needs of cloud practitioners.

Multi-cloud optimization

The options for optimizing public cloud spend include activities that span both financial (e.g., commitment-based discounting) and resource-usage (e.g., rightsizing overprovisioned resources) domains. Getting this right can make a huge difference on your monthly infrastructure bills and the economics of running cloud generally. A large percentage of cloud customers are now multi-cloud — “Gartner® research suggests that 76% of those using cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are currently leveraging multiple IaaS providers.”* One of the challenges practitioners face daily is applying optimization strategies that need to be tailored to the specific implementation of each cloud vendor. In the first half of 2023, we’ve added the following capabilities, extending Cloudability’s leadership in providing cost-saving recommendations across the most popular cloud services:

1. GCP Committed Use Discounts (CUD) purchase recommendations: CUDs provide Google customers with the ability to reduce the hourly rates paid in return for committing to levels of usage for one-year or three-year terms. Cloudability’s planner evaluates historic usage patterns and current on-demand usage to recommend CUD purchases that will increase commitment coverage and maximize savings. Users can validate the recommendations with interactive charts and hourly usage data, adjusting the purchase level to their current needs.
2. Azure Savings Plan recommendations and portfolio: Similar to CUDs, Azure Savings Plans enable customers to reduce rates in return for a usage commitment. These new recommendations help users quantify the exact savings opportunity available through purchasing additional Savings Plans, while the portfolio gives an aggregated view of all owned Savings Plans across the organization, helping simplify overall management.
3. Rightsizing recommendations for GCP Managed Instance Groups (MIG): These recommendations enable engineers to make informed cost-performance tradeoffs for VMs that belong to a MIG. The solution automatically maps all GCE VMs to their MIG and provides a holistic cost-saving recommendation for the entire workload, including the option to adjust the hourly VM count or the machine type.

Cloud planning

Planning in the context of public cloud is a highly complex activity due both to its variable, consumption-based spend model and the fact that every cloud vendor has its own exhaustive set of SKUs covering many types of cloud resources. Even so, it is critical for IT and digital groups to get this planning right so that financial forecasts are dependable and the right cloud and services are selected for key applications. In the first half of 2023, we’ve been adding new features that support these goals and take collaboration during planning cycles to the next level.

1. Workload Planning (beta): The Workload Planning feature provides a flexible interface for users to define future workloads with the ability to model and compare costs for popular resource types (e.g., VM, managed database, storage, load balancer) across the three major cloud vendors.
2. Cloudability Financial Planning (beta): Build full financial plans leveraging both AI-based forecasting and input from stakeholders across the business. This feature encourages collaboration during planning and, by publishing financial plans that are tied to actuals for each business unit, enables financial performance to be tracked in near-real time.
3. AWS Inventory Reporting: Download and visualize an authoritative list of cloud resources that existed and were billed during a specific reporting period​. By unifying billing, utilization, and descriptive meta data for these resources, users get an unparalleled view and ability to audit their AWS infrastructure.

New expansion

While Cloudability offers the most comprehensive set of FinOps capabilities of any tool in the market, we aren’t ready to rest on our laurels. Public cloud is a dynamic space, and we are laser-focused on meeting our customers’ evolving needs and extending access to completely new markets. With this in mind, we’ve had these three major launches already this year.

1. Cloudability Savings Automation: With our acquisition of Cloudwiry in January, we have now built out an offering that enables organizations to run their commitment program on autopilot, freeing up critical FinOps resources and delivering savings that are not achievable with a manual approach.
2. Cloudability Government: As announced at the 2023 Public Sector Summit, Apptio has furthered its commitment to the public sector with the achievement of FedRAMP moderate authorization for Cloudability and our comprehensive cloud financial management solutions.
3. Red Hat OpenShift on AWS (ROSA) Support: Running containerized infrastructure on public cloud comes with its own unique FinOps challenges. With this launch, we bring our leading container cost insights capabilities to ROSA, helping customers allocate these costs as part of a monthly chargeback and rightsize request and limit settings to reduce operational costs.

Join us at FinOps X

Learn more about the new FinOps capabilities of Cloudability. If you’re attending FinOps X in San Diego June 27-30, come to our session to hear more about how Apptio is creating FinOps innovation. Apptio’s Senior Director of Product Marketing Marisa Banigan will be joined by HERE Technologies Senior DevOps Manager David Van Hoeven in a session titled “Driving Intelligent Investment Decisions with Unit Economics and Product Profitability” on June 28 at 1:10 p.m. PDT

* Gartner®, Emerging Tech: Data Management Product Leaders Must Implement Augmented FinOps in Their Cloud Solutions, Published 7 October 2022 By Robin Schumacher, Adam Ronthal.

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