IBM Cloudability Feature

CostGuard: Proactive Cost Insights

Achieve FinOps goals by integrating cost insights into developer workflows

Cloud cost management and optimization has traditionally been a reactive process, with relevant actions usually taken many days after deployment. This situation can allow waste and bad patterns to spread, accumulate, and then force teams into optimization fire drills.

IBM Cloudability’s CostGuard is an innovative capability that puts proactive insights into engineering workflows, preventing undesirable cost events occurring in the first place.

Know the cost impact – before deployment

Cloudability’s CostGuard is currently available as a GitHub app, delivering extensive developer reach via the most popular distributed version control platform. With this app installed and configured to your needs, engineers are alerted to the expected cost impact of new and changing cloud workloads, providing a validation check before they move forward.

For engineers this represents a seamless experience, with insights based on their infrastructure as code (IaC) templates (Terraform Configuration File, for instance) and surfaced within their regular development workflow.

Align engineers to cost and governance policies

Cloudability’s CostGuard offers an optional governance module, helping engineers comply with their organization’s cloud policies. This includes important concerns such as:

  • Resource tagging – confirming required keys and approved values are present
  • Approved infrastructure options – allowable cloud services, regions and VM families
  • Budget limits

There are two options when applying these policies – an inform mode to let engineers know their IaC template is out of compliance, or an enforcement mode which prevents the change from proceeding.

Flexible admin controls backed by the full intelligence of Cloudability

Backed by the full intelligence of the Cloudability platform, CostGuard provides dependable cost insights and a robust policy engine. Cost projections are trained on billions of dollars of historical cloud spend data and are tailored to specific organizational needs, including custom pricing and commitment coverage. This enables CostGuard to forecast reliably, helping your engineers manage cloud expenditures with confidence.

Cloudability’s flexible policy engine supports FinOps administrators in configuring and enforcing governance rules that align with organizational requirements. Admins have precise control when defining what constitutes compliant versus non-compliant cloud usage.

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