AWS re:Invent, one of the biggest tech events in the world, is just weeks away. While there are thousands of sessions to choose from, there's bound to be high interest in sessions focused on cloud cost optimization and management. That's because maximizing cloud efficiency and reducing waste is ranking as a top priority, and a challenge for organizations of all sizes. If cloud cost savings is important for your business, we've compiled a list of the best sessions to attend. You can find the sessions listed below by visiting the AWS re:Invent Session Catalog where there is an option to search by keyword and register. Umbrella is leading one of the sessions — focusing on the power of insight to accelerate AWS — and will be exhibiting at booth #2540 where you can get one-on-one time with one of our cloud experts to learn how to optimize your AWS cloud spend. Book a meeting here to secure your spot! Monday, November 28 Spot the savings: Use Amazon EC2 Spot to optimize cloud deployments   CMP324-R | Time: 1:00 - 3:00 PM | Session Type: Workshop  Amazon EC2 Spot Instances are spare compute capacity available to you for less than On-Demand prices. EC2 Spot enables you to optimize your costs and scale your application’s throughput. This workshop walks you through the APIs and commands used to create Spot Instances: You create an EC2 launch template and then use the launch template to launch Spot Instances using EC2 Auto Scaling groups, EC2 Spot Fleet, EC2 Fleet, and EC2 RunInstances API. Also learn how to implement Spot functions such as Spot placement score, attribute-based instance selection, and AWS Fault Injection Simulator. Cloud metrics strategy and customizable billing   COP202-R | Time: 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM |  Session Type: Chalk Talk A well-defined cloud metrics strategy helps organizations evaluate the efficiency of cloud resource utilization and tell a cloud value story that is aligned with business outcomes. The ability to customize pricing and billing views allows you to charge back to your end users in a streamlined process. Join this session to learn how you can construct KPI strategies and accountability with services such as AWS Billing Conductor and start running your IT department like a business. Visualizing AWS Config and Amazon CloudWatch usage and costs   COP215-R | Time: 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM | Session Type: Chalk Talk  In this session, explore dashboards that you can deploy into your own account to get a real-time view of some of the typical main contributors to AWS Config and Amazon CloudWatch costs. The dashboards are designed to help you identify high-cost areas and see the impact of any changes made over time. You can deploy the dashboards into your own account and explore how to create and modify them for your own needs. How to save costs and optimize Microsoft workloads on AWS   ENT205 | Time: 4:00 - 5:00 PM | Session Type: Breakout Session Customers have been running Microsoft workloads on AWS for 14 years—longer than any other cloud provider—giving AWS unmatched experience to help you migrate, optimize, and modernize your Windows Server and SQL Server workloads. In this session, learn best practices and see demos on how to right-size your infrastructure and save on Microsoft licensing costs; how to configure your workloads to run more efficiently; how to avoid expensive and punitive licensing restrictions; and how AWS offers you the most and highest performing options for your Microsoft workloads. How SingleStore saves 56 percent on Amazon EC2 with no DevOps hours invested    PRT095 | Time: 5:10 - 5:25 | Session Type: Lightning Talk  For SingleStore, the cost of data is high. To manage the cost of running their SQL distributed database, SingleStore aimed to drive cost efficiency as far as they could. SLA requirements for data continuity prevented them from utilizing highly discounted Amazon EC2 Spot Instances. But the long-term commitments associated with other discount programs made them too risky to cover fluctuating workloads. In this lightning talk Ken Dickinson, VP of Cloud Infrastructure at SingleStore, explains how SingleStore was able to ramp up their Amazon EC2 savings even further. Learn how they covered 99 percent of their workloads to help them break through their previous savings ceiling. This presentation is brought to you by Zesty, an AWS Partner. Tuesday, November 29 Continuous cost and sustainability optimization   SUP304 | Time: 11:45 - 1:45 | Session Type: Workshop In this workshop, learn best practices for cost and sustainability optimization. Shift costs and sustainability responsibilities from the Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) to end users and application owners aided by automation at scale. Learn about cost efficiency and implementing mechanisms that empower application owners to have clear, actionable tasks for cost and sustainability optimization building upon real-world use cases. You must bring your laptop to participate. How to use Amazon S3 Storage Lens to gain insights and optimize costs   STG335 | Time: 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM | Session Type: Builder's Session  As your dataset grows on Amazon S3, it becomes increasingly valuable to use tools and automation to manage and analyze your data and optimize storage costs. In this builders’ session, learn about Amazon S3 Storage Lens which delivers a single view of object storage usage and activity across your entire Amazon S3 storage. It includes drill-down options to generate insights at the organization, account, Region, bucket, or even prefix level. Walk through S3 Storage Lens, and learn how to get started with this feature with your own storage. You must bring your laptop to participate. Multi- and hybrid-cloud cost optimization with Flexera One    Time: 2:40 PM - 2:55 PM | Session Type: Lightning Talk In this talk, Flexera discusses and demonstrates the Cloud Cost Optimization (CCO) functionality of the Flexera One platform. See how CCO allows you to achieve a true single-pane-of-glass view for all multi-cloud resources, including global regions of major cloud providers and emerging and niche cloud offerings. Using CCO’s Common Bill Ingestion functionality, any additional cloud resource costs (support costs, labor costs, VAT, etc.) can be ingested into the platform and viewed and analyzed alongside existing cloud resources. All phases of the FinOps framework are activated within CCO and will be included in this demonstration. This presentation is brought to you by Flexera, an AWS Partner. AWS optimization: Actionable steps for immediate results   STP210-R1 | Time: 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM | Session Type: Theatre Session Cash burn is a hot topic for startups, and late-stage funded ventures especially need to keep tabs on budget as they ramp up. AWS offers resources to make cost management, budget tracking, and optimization simple and attainable for startups of any size. In this session, get familiar with the different technical strategies, levers to pull, and commitment-based savings plans AWS offers. After this session, you will have an actionable plan with a combination of tactical and strategic initiatives that can help you reduce overall spend and increase your runway.   Scaling performance and lowering cost with the right choice of compute   CMP318-R | Time: 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM | Session Type: Chalk Talk  This chalk talk covers the latest innovations across Intel, AMD, and AWS Graviton compute options (i.e., Intel Ice Lake, AMD Milan, and AWS Graviton3) to help companies choose the optimal instance for their workloads. Learn about the price performance benefits enabled by AWS compute options and the AWS Nitro System across a broad spectrum of workloads. Simplify your AWS cost estimation   Time: 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM | Session Type: Breakout Session  Take the guesswork out of planning with AWS: accurately evaluate the cost impact of your AWS workloads as you grow and save on AWS. Join this chalk talk to learn how you can plan for changes to your workload and simplify your cost estimate. Understand how modifications of your purchase commitments, resource usage, and commercial terms affect your future AWS spend.   Optimize for cost and availability with capacity management   CMP319 | Time: 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM | Session Type: Chalk Talk  Managing your capacity footprint at the enterprise level can be complex. This chalk talk covers how to plan for, acquire, monitor, and optimize your capacity footprint to achieve your goals of maximizing for capacity availability while minimizing costs. Leave this talk with an understanding of how to use Amazon EC2 Capacity Reservations, On-Demand Capacity Reservations, and Savings Plans to lower costs so that you can focus on innovating. Visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs   COP336-R1 | Time: 5:00 - 6:00 | Session Type: Builder's Session  Having actionable cost insights with the right level of cost reporting allows you to scale on AWS with confidence. Join this hands-on builders session to learn which resources are available for you to achieve cost transparency, dive deep into cost and usage data, and uncover best practices and dashboards to simplify your cost reporting. Explore AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) and then learn how to export and query CUR and visualize resource-level data such as AWS Lambda functions and Amazon S3 bucket costs using the CUDOS dashboard. Wednesday, November 30 Cloud FinOps: Empower real-time decision making   PRT322 | Time: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM | Session Type: Breakout Session  As organizations align their processes to the realities of operating in the cloud, they seek to understand what they are spending and, more specifically, how they can analyze their infrastructure in their business context. FinOps practitioners can implement a dedicated solution to analyze data, manage anomalies, and measure unit costs. Join this session to learn how CloudHealth, a recognized leader in FinOps and cloud cost management, gives users the information they need to meet their organizational goals and objectives. This presentation is brought to you by VMware, an AWS Partner.  FinOps: The powerful ability of insight to accelerate AWS (sponsored by Umbrella)   PRT035 | Time: 10:55 - 11:10 AM | Session Type: Lightning Talk  Attend this talk to learn how you can empower your business stakeholders with clarity and highly personalized insights to unlock all the cloud has to offer. Learn tactics and best practices for developing your AWS cost management strategy by minimizing noise and maximizing the relevance between your FinOps practice and your unique business objectives. This presentation is brought to you by Umbrella, an AWS Partner.   Thursday, December 1 FinOps: Intersecting cost, performance, and software license optimization (sponsored by Flexera)   PRT306 |Time: 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM | Session Type: Workshop  Within the rapidly maturing FinOps discipline, cost is the driving force behind the optimization of cloud resources. Actions taken to optimize costs may be detrimental to application performance or be at odds with licensing restrictions for the software running on those resources. In this workshop, experts from Flexera and IBM Turbonomic identify overlooked aspects of cloud cost optimization and demonstrate how successful FinOps practices require visibility and continuous analysis of performance metrics and licensing constraints when optimizing cloud resources. You must bring your laptop to participate. This presentation is brought to you by Flexera, an AWS Partner. Building a budget-conscious culture at Standard Chartered Bank   CMP213 | Time: 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM | Session Type: Breakout Session  In this session, Standard Chartered Bank shares how FinOps has been embedded in the way they build systems. Critical large systems at Standard Chartered Bank—such as scaling applications, container platforms, and their grid for calculating risk and analytics—use techniques to reduce waste and optimize cost and performance at scale. These techniques include using an optimal combination of AWS Savings Plans and Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, building for elasticity, and applying automation to switch down systems not in use.

We are proud to announce that Umbrella has been named Momentum Leader on G2's fall grid for Cloud Cost Management Software. G2 is the largest and most trusted software marketplace. More than 60 million people annually use G2 to make smarter software decisions based on authentic peer reviews. G2 is disrupting the traditional analyst model and building trust by showcasing the authentic voice of millions of software buyers. Global customers use Umbrella's cloud cost management solution to monitor and manage their multi-cloud and Kubernetes spend in real-time. G2's grid report is based on user ratings and not information self-reported by vendors. G2 scores products and vendors based on reviews from verified users as well as data aggregated from online source. Here are some of Umbrella's most recent reviews on G2: "The best FinOps application" "Simply the best cost management tool on the market"  "Great tool to save time and money"  Cloud visibility and cost control Keeping cloud costs under control is notoriously difficult. Cloud assets are fragmented across multiple teams, cloud vendors and containerized environments. Umbrella provides granular visibility into cloud costs and seamlessly combines all of your cloud spend into a single platform. Users can monitor and optimize cost and resource utilization across AWS, Azure and GCP. Umbrella's AI/ML powered solution automatically learns each service usage pattern and alerts relevant teams to irregular cloud spend and usage, providing the full context of what is happening so engineers can take action. By monitoring cloud metrics together with revenue and business metrics, Umbrella enables cloud teams to understand the true cost of their SaaS customers and features. [CTA id="6c56537c-2f3f-4ee7-bcc1-1b074802aa4c"][/CTA] Cloud cost savings recommendations As companies progress along their FinOps journey, many will face competing initiatives. It can be challenging to prioritize cost optimization recommendations and make sure the right decisions are being made. Identifying the engineering efforts and potential savings can help your team determine priorities. Umbrella offers 60+ best-in-class savings recommendations that are highly personalized to your business and infrastructure. CLI and console instructions are provided alongside each savings insight to enable engineers to take action in the way they find most comfortable. Kubernetes visibility for FinOps Kubernetes drives service agility and portability, but it can also be far more difficult to understand just how much each K8s-based application costs. Umbrella provides granular visibility into your Kubernetes costs and combines it with your non-containerized costs and business metrics so you can get an accurate view of how much it costs to run a microservice, feature, etc. With Umbrella's powerful algorithms and multidimensional filters, you can analyze your performance in depth and identify underutilization at the node and pod level. Cloud cost management with Umbrella Bring finance, DevOps and business stakeholders together to collaboratively control and reduce spend across your cloud infrastructures with Umbrella. See cost causation and allocate spend by service, business unit, team and app with deep visibility and granular detail. Continuously eliminate waste with easy-to-action savings recommendations Avoid bill shock and enable FinOps with near real-time anomaly detection and alerts Try Umbrella's cloud cost management solution with a 30-day free trial. Instantly get an overview of your cloud usage, costs, and expected annual savings.

7 KPIs for Measuring FinOps Success Public cloud can deliver significant business value across infrastructure cost savings, team productivity, service elasticity, and DevOps agility. Yet, up to 70% of organizations are regularly overshooting their cloud budgets, minimizing the gap between cloud costs and the revenue cloud investments can drive. Cloud cost management (the practice of FinOps — often assigned to a multidisciplinary, cross-functional group, also called “FinOps,” or a “Cloud Center of Excellence”) is targeted at helping businesses maximize the return on their investments in cloud technologies and services. Because managing cloud costs is such a relevant challenge, and is such an area of focus, it has been ascribed many names, including, “Cloud Financial Management,” “Cloud Financial Engineering,” “Cloud Cost Management,” “Cloud Cost Optimization,” and “Cloud Financial Optimization.” Every business with cloud infrastructure will have a cloud cost management strategy, and every successful strategy will include a practice of benchmarking and measurement to ensure progress and improvement towards increasing return on cloud investments. Cloud cost efficiency measurement Amazon Web Services, the largest public cloud service provider, devotes one-sixth of their Well-Architected Framework to avoiding unnecessary costs. While the Cost Optimization Pillar is comprehensive, it is largely written in broad strokes and generalizations, rather than identifying specific tactics and KPIs that can deliver FinOps success. Although valuable, the Well-Architected cost pillar focuses on operationalizing using a plethora of discreet AWS-native tools and offers little insight for businesses with modern multicloud strategies (even ignoring the existence of other public clouds). The FinOps Foundation, a program of The Linux Foundation, segments cloud financial management into FinOps Capabilities (grouped into overarching FinOps Domains) that each consist of “Crawl,” “Walk,” and “Run” operational maturity levels. The maturity level of each capability within a business is assessed according to goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). [CTA id="6c56537c-2f3f-4ee7-bcc1-1b074802aa4c"][/CTA] Simplified FinOps measurement strategies While some FinOps models cover a tremendous amount of ground, and often, even deliver specific KPI targets, they can require months of implementation and corporate cultural change efforts before returning value and meaningful data. This guide endeavors to simplify the measurement of FinOps efficiency into its most important metrics. This approach enables your business to assess the current impact of cloud cost management efforts at the macro level to deliver immediate insights, and can serve as a precursor to significantly more sophisticated and time-consuming FinOps strategies and measurement efforts. As your cloud consumption increases, measuring and tracking cloud efficiency will become a critical task. The following KPIs are critical to understanding the effectiveness of your FinOps efforts and driving incremental success: Percentage of Allocatable Cloud Spend Average Hourly Cost Cloud Unit Costs Percentage of Waste Blend of Purchasing Strategies Time to Address Cost Anomalies Forecasting accuracy Using FinOps to drive cloud efficiency The 7 KPIs above are probably the most important indicators of your cloud account's efficiency, but there are plenty more. Think about the KPIs you currently track in your organization as you review this list. Do you need additional tools or resources to track these KPIs? Defining the KPIs that can measure cloud efficiency is crucial for many organizations. Continuous cost monitoring allows for assessing what percentage of the costs are justified, and where improvements can be made. Cost efficiency is a shared responsibility across multiple levels of an organization. As the FinOps team or expert, it’s our responsibility to make sure we have the proper guardrails, cost monitoring, process optimization, and rate optimization in place. It is then up to the engineering teams using cloud services to make sure the solutions they architect and engineer are as cost-effective as possible. The road to cloud efficiency has many challenges, including: Visibility and cost allocation for multi-cloud and Kubernetes An increase in complexity due to using container-based applications and serverless technologies Identifying and avoiding pitfalls in FinOps adoption It is possible to overcome technology, visibility, and cost allocation challenges by using native Cloud Service Provider tools, building inhouse solutions, or purchasing FinOps tools — such as Umbrella cloud cost management Umbrella is the only FinOps platform built to measure and drive success in FinOps, giving you complete visibility into your KPIs and baselines, recommendations to help you control cloud waste and spend, and reporting to make sure you improve your cloud efficiency. Identifying and solving organizational challenges is not always easy. Here are a few things you can do from an operational perspective to take action today: You can make different stakeholders aware of their responsibilities by implementing a solid showback model. Cloud cost reporting with real-time data is crucial for the teams to understand how they are doing - make the information available directly to them. Communicate what efforts are being made and what savings can be expected. Mentor and support teams that are facing challenges in their cost efficiency instead of shaming and punishing them. Check out FinOps Foundation for great resources around training and buy-in. Book a demo with an Umbrella cloud cost optimization expert to show your team what is achievable with a purpose-built FinOps solution

Cloud cost anomalies are unpredicted variations (typically increases) in cloud spending that are larger than expected based on historical patterns.  Misconfiguration, unused resources, malicious activity or overambitious projects are some of the reasons for unexpected anomalies in cloud costs. Even the smallest of incidents can add up over time leading to cost overruns and bill shock. As cloud billing data is collected and reviewed periodically, it is often difficult for FinOps teams to detect anomalies related to cloud costs in real or near time.  According to the State of FinOps 2022 report, 53% of organizations indicated that it takes days for their FinOps teams to respond to cost anomalies. It is probably because only 25% of companies have implemented automated workflows to manage anomalies.  Measuring cloud cost anomalies Anomaly management is composed of three distinct phases that should be measured separately: Time to detection (occurrence to discovery/acknowledgement)  Time to root cause (time of investigation) Time to resolution (total duration of the anomaly) Additionally, you should also measure the count of anomalies within a given period (e.g., day, week or month). Automated, machine learning–based anomaly detection systems, such as Umbrella, allow the FinOps team to react quickly to avoid unexpected costs.  [CTA id="6c56537c-2f3f-4ee7-bcc1-1b074802aa4c"][/CTA] Managing cloud anomalies with Umbrella Umbrella's fully automated AI detects anomalies in near real time and alerts the appropriate teams only when risk is meaningful, enabling quick response and resolution. With Umbrella’s continuous monitoring and deep visibility, engineers gain the power to eliminate unpredictable spending. Umbrella automatically learns each service usage pattern and alerts relevant teams to irregular cloud spend and usage anomalies, providing the full context of what is happening for the fastest time to resolution. Umbrella seamlessly combines all of your cloud spend into a single platform. Monitor and optimize your cloud costs and resource utilization across AWS, GCP, and Azure. Deep dive into your data details and get a clear picture of how your infrastructure and economies are changing. With Umbrella, you can: Get complete visibility into AWS, Azure, GCP and Kubernetes costs: Understand, divide, track and attribute every dollar spent in context Easily customize reports and dashboards for FinOps stakeholders Manage Kubernetes spending and usage from the same view as your multicloud services Take action and continuously reduce your cloud costs: Pursue the most pertinent cost reduction opportunities with 40+ types of cost savings recommendations CLI and console instructions provided alongside each insight to enable engineers to take action Purchase services efficiently with analysis and customized recommendations Plan your usage effectively and prevent bill shock: Machine-learning based forecasting accurately predicts spend and usage, empowering you to anticipate changing conditions and deliver Detect, alert on, and resolve irregular spending and usage anomalies in near real time Assess enriched Umbrella data via our powerful API and leverage within your other tools With Umbrella, FinOps practitioners can continuously optimize their cloud investments to drive strategic business initiatives.

Companies are investing heavily in the cloud for the operational and financial benefits. But without a robust cloud cost management strategy in place, the complexity of cloud services and billing can to overspending and unnecessary cloud waste. Being able to accurately predict future cloud spend is one way to more optimize cloud spend and inform budgets. Ideally, finance, engineering and executive leadership agree upon and build allocation and forecast models from which to establish budgets that align with business goals. Once a strategy is in place, cloud cost forecasting accuracy is an important KPI to measure in order to understand cloud efficiency and FinOps success. Measuring forecast accuracy  To measure your forecasting accuracy, you’ll need to calculate the variance between your forecast and actual costs. Once the forecasted spend variance (%) is calculated, it can be compared against the FinOps Community of Practitioners' recommended thresholds: For FinOps practices operating at Crawl maturity, variance from actual spend cannot exceed 20% Variance of 15% for a FinOps practice operating at Walk maturity Variations of 12% for FinOps practices operating at Run maturity [CTA id="6c56537c-2f3f-4ee7-bcc1-1b074802aa4c"][/CTA] In the State of FinOps 2022 report, Run organizations reported 5% variance; Walk organizations reported 10% variance; and Crawl organizations reported 20% variance — a testament to the value of a growing FinOps practice. Accurate cloud spend forecasts require robust FinOps capabilities across the board, including complete multi cloud visibility and the ability to fully categorize and allocate cloud costs. Forecasting cloud costs with Umbrella  Umbrella’s AI-powered solution analyzes historical data in order to accurately forecast cloud spend and usage by unit of choice, anticipate changing conditions, and get a better read on related costs. This helps organizations to make more informed budgeting decisions and find the right balance between CapEx and OpEx. From a single platform, Umbrella provides complete, end-to-end visibility into an organization’s entire cloud infrastructure and related billing costs. By monitoring cloud metrics together with revenue and business metrics, Umbrella enables cloud teams to understand the true cost of their cloud resources, with benefits such as: Deep visibility and insights - Report on and allocate 100% of your multicloud costs (with K8 insight down to the pod level) and deliver relevant, customized reporting for each persona in your FinOps organization Easy-to-action savings recommendations - Reduce waste and maximize utilization with 40+ savings recommendations highly personalized to your business and infrastructure Continuous cost monitoring and control - Adaptive, AI-powered forecasting, budgeting and anomaly detection empower you to manage cloud spend with a high degree of accuracy and relevance Immediate value - You'll know how much you can immediately save from day one and rely on pre-configured, customized reports and forecasts to begin eliminating waste  

One of the key advantages of cloud services versus on premise deployments is the wide range of purchasing options and pricing models. While it's an attractive advantage, it can be complicated for organizations to determine the best blend of service pricing models. The ability to define the organization's blend of purchasing strategies and display the target versus actual performance is critical for optimizing cloud cost management efforts. There are several KPIs to help you measure FinOps efficiency and ensure you use the commitment capabilities offered by your cloud provider. Cloud pricing models All major cloud providers offer several pricing models: On-Demand: pay for capacity by the hour or the second depending on which instances you run. No longer-term commitments or upfront payments are needed. Reserved Instances (RIs), Committed Use Discounts (CUDs), and Savings Plans (SPs): flexible pricing models that offer discounts if you commit (based on resource usage or spend) over a fixed period. Spot Instances: purchase spare AWS capacity for up to 90% off the On-Demand price. The downside is that you receive a 2-minute notification that AWS can take the server back and you’ll need to set up a new one. On-demand coverage  Using On-Demand is the most expensive option. One of the metrics that users should measure is the percentage of coverage of On-Demand for each service and determine what can be switched to a different method (Spot / Commitment). Using Spot or workloads that can handle a 2-minute notice before an interruption is a great way to optimize your savings. Generally, they should be stateless applications. It is very common to use Spot on test and development environments. With stable workloads, the preferred method is to buy a commitment that will help you maximize your discount without any interruptions to your workloads. Commitment utilization When it comes to commitments, we want to make sure they're all being used. This is what is called commitment utilization. In this KPI, 2 things are being measured: How much is saved due to the commitments vs. how much waste there is and the ratio between them? The specific percentage of utilization When considering a commitment, you want to give yourself the most coverage while maintaining elasticity — start with no more than 60%, and as you understand your usage, you can increase it. Both of these indicators help make sure that not only are you achieving great coverage but that you are also using your commitment and not wasting money, as the target here is to achieve great coverage. These two KPIs are the first steps in measuring the efficiency of your cloud as well as making sure that you are using the commitment capabilities that the cloud provider offers.  [CTA id="6c56537c-2f3f-4ee7-bcc1-1b074802aa4c"][/CTA] Optimize Purchasing with Umbrella  Umbrella helps companies make smart committed use purchases using personalized recommendations base on historical and forecasted usage. Umbrella generates savings recommendations by analyzing all incurred usage eligible to be covered by a SP/RI, and uses proprietary algorithms to simulate possible combinations of RIs that would cover that usage. Umbrella helps FinOps teams prioritize recommendations based on impact, and it keeps a complete history of recommendations and actions taken. You can visualize the impact of every change before and after it has been implemented. You can tune recommendations based on organizational preferences, snooze them, or reject them outright. Umbrella monitors your cloud metrics together with your revenue and business metrics so you can understand the true unit economics of your SaaS customers, features, engineering teams and more. With Umbrella, FinOps practitioners can continuously optimize their cloud investments and drive strategic business initiatives.

Cloud spend — which research shows makes up 51% of IT budgets — is a prime candidate for company cost savings initiatives with the potential to make a huge difference in gross margins.  It’s also an area that has grown dramatically in the last few years due to digital transformation and a rise in cloud demand during the pandemic. The question is, where should finance and IT leaders focus their cost cutting and cloud cost management measures without impacting business operations, performance and availability? An obvious place for companies to start is analyzing and reducing cloud waste. Why? Surveys consistently show an average of 30% of cloud spend is wasted. Cloud providers charge for services provisioned, even if they’re not used. Overprovisioned, unused, and orphaned cloud resources are common in many organizations. Further, On-Demand rates for resources are significantly higher than commitment-based discount rates.  Sources of Cloud Waste Percentage of waste is based on open savings opportunities to optimize cloud billing. To measure this indicator, you have to first define what you consider waste. Waste can be roughly divided into three types: Idle and unattached resources Resources that can be right-sized Commitment purchase opportunity Measuring Cloud Waste Cloud waste is an important KPI for measuring cloud efficiency and FinOps success. The percentage waste KPI is built on a daily/weekly/monthly scan of cloud usage and then finding usage reduction options. Using one of these three groups, you calculate what percentage of the total use is inefficient: Cost of unused cloud resources against total cost (%) Cost of over-provisioned resources against total cost (%) Percent of infrastructure running on-demand vs. covered by discount or Spot, measured by hours (%) Some common examples include the percentage of EBS Unattached out of the entire EBS costs, or the percentage of Old Snapshot out of the entire Snapshot costs, etc.  [CTA id="6c56537c-2f3f-4ee7-bcc1-1b074802aa4c"][/CTA] Reduce Cloud Waste with Umbrella Systems like Umbrella can scan for dozens cloud cost optimization opportunities automatically and calculate a sustained waste percentage. As a result, you can measure whether the overall waste of all cloud costs has been reduced, or if a specific type of waste has been reduced.  With Umbrella, you can bring finance, devops, and business stakeholders together to collaboratively control and reduce spend across all your cloud infrastructure. Continuously eliminate waste with easy-to-action savings recommendations that can drive significant savings. See cost causation and allocate spend by service, business unit, team, and app with deep visibility, granular detail, and reporting across AWS, GCP, and pod level Kubernetes. Avoid bill shock and enable FinOps with near real-time anomaly detection and alerts and insightful, machine learning powered cloud cost forecasting. Umbrella monitors your cloud metrics together with your revenue and business metrics — so you can understand your true unit economics (revenue, cost, or margin) of your SaaS customers, features, engineering teams, and more. Umbrella automatically learns each service usage pattern and alerts relevant teams to irregular spend and usage anomalies, providing the full context of what is happening for the fastest time to resolution. 

Cloud adoption has been on an upward trajectory for over a decade with no signs of slowing down. As widescale migration becomes the norm, organizations are realizing cloud financial management — also referred to as FinOps — is critical to creating long term value in the cloud. Building a culture of financial discipline requires visibility and a strategy for measuring success along the way. Several important KPIs should be measured to understand the effectiveness of your FinOps efforts, including unit metrics. Unit metrics allows businesses to measure the effectiveness of cloud cost management efforts and to plan and predict budgets by making delivery teams financially accountable to business drivers. By using unit economics, FinOps teams can correlate cloud spending growth to overall business growth, surfacing problems when cloud spending grows too quickly. Unit economics explained   A business model’s unit economics describes its revenues and costs in relation to one unit — such as a customer served or unit sold. To understand costs, you must first identify the resources required per customer. A resource is any cloud service that has a direct or shared cost associated with it. If you have dozens of customers on shared resources like databases, storage, and microservices, you would need to model the resources into smaller pieces and understand the time (CPU) and/or memory a specific customer is consuming. Measuring unit costs   According to the FinOps Community of Practitioners: At the Crawl maturity level, FinOps practices measure cloud spend for a particular application against total revenue (e.g., cloud spend as a percentage of revenue). The Walk maturity level requires tying outputs to a unit of activity (e.g., API call cost). The Run maturity level requires measuring how much it costs to do a revenue-generating activity (e.g., cost of a transaction or customer). Unit costs are not a priority for most organizations since they are difficult to understand and measure. According to the State of FinOps 2022 report, only one in four organizations use unit costs, even though organizations operating at the Run maturity level report using them to effectively execute decisions, promote FinOps culture, and drive their FinOps success. Unit costs will never be completely accurate. The cost of these services can, however, be estimated intelligently using several methods of varying accuracy. [CTA id="6c56537c-2f3f-4ee7-bcc1-1b074802aa4c"][/CTA] Unit economics with Umbrella   Umbrella's business monitoring platform analyzes metrics and identifies anomalies. Therefore, metrics are our main KPI and unit of measure. The simplest way for us to measure the costs of our customers is to count the total metrics for all of our customers, then divide the cost of all of our cloud costs and divide it by the total unit metrics. With Umbrella’s Business Mapping feature, you can accurately map multi cloud and Kubernetes spending data, assign shared costs equitably, and report cloud spend to drive FinOps collaboration for your organization. Mappings are built from one or more rules that allocate spend to a business dimension using sophisticated and nested evaluation criteria. With each additional mapping, the remaining pool of cloud costs is further divided without overlap. Umbrella helps you understand your cloud unit economics by aligning your cloud costs to key business dimensions. Allowing you to track and report on unit costs and get a clear picture of how your infrastructure and economies are changing.  

Achieving cost savings is one of the main drivers for cloud adoption. But for most companies, controlling cloud spend is much more challenging than anticipated. In a recent survey, 94% of IT decision makers report they are overspending in the cloud. Our own survey on cloud costs revealed 90% of executives say better cloud cost management and cost reduction is a top priority. To achieve better cloud financial management, the practice of FinOps — often assigned to a multidisciplinary and cross-functional group — is emerging as the standard for understanding and optimizing cloud computing costs and resources. To ensure FinOps success, organizations should include a practice of benchmarking and measurement to ensure improvement in cloud management. Cloud Instance Costs One of the KPIs most critical for measuring cloud efficiency is hourly cloud service costs. The hourly cost of an instance is affected by a lot of different factors, such as its type, size, and payment plan. An average hourly cost is a way to normalize cloud service costs across projects, teams, use cases and billing methods. This indicator can be used for any service whose cost can be measured in hours or seconds, but users generally measure some or all of these five services: EC2 RDS Redshift Open Search ElasticCache The average hourly cost KPI is mainly affected by the following: Machine size — The smaller the machine you use, the lower the hourly cost will be. Sometimes a powerful machine is necessary, making improvements irrelevant. But often, you can save money and reduce the average hourly computing cost by choosing a less powerful machine that is appropriate for your use case. Form of payment — There are five ways to pay for AWS instances: On-Demand, Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, and Spot Instances. With a cheaper payment option, like Spot Instances (up to 90% off On-Demand prices) or machines covered by a commitment agreement, the hourly cost decreases, improving this metric. A reduction in average hourly cost is indicative of improved cloud efficiency since it considers multiple parameters. [CTA id="6c56537c-2f3f-4ee7-bcc1-1b074802aa4c"][/CTA] Umbrella for Cloud Cost Management It is possible to overcome visibility and cost challenges by using native cloud service provider tools, building in house solutions, or purchasing FinOps tools, such as Umbrella. Umbrella is the only platform built to measure and drive success in FinOps, giving teams visibility into KPIs and baselines and recommendations to help control spend. Umbrella's 40+ savings recommendations help teams continually eliminate waste and drive savings by optimizing how you purchase AWS, Azure and GCP. Enable FinOps with Umbrella Visualize — Understand costs and drive ownership Track, divide and attribute every dollar spent in context with its business role or KPI, team, shared service and application Customize reports and dashboards for each FinOps stakeholder Manager Kubernetes spending and usage from the save view as your multicloud services Optimize — Cut costs with easy-to-action savings recommendations Pursue savings opportunities with personalized cost reduction recommendations CLI and console instructions provided alongside each insight enable engineers to take action fast Purchase services efficiently with analysis and customized recommendations for commitment and discount vehicles Monitor — Operate your clouds efficiently and avoid billing surprises Machine learning-based forecasting accurately predicts spend and usage Detect and resolve irregular spending and usage anomalies Access enriched Umbrella data via our powerful API and leverage it within your other tools Umbrella's cost allocation feature helps organizations accurately map multicloud and Kubernetes spending data, assign shared costs equitably, and drive FinOps collaboration throughout your organization. Inform and empower business decisions at all levels with Umbrella's cloud cost management solution.