Firstly, serverless doesn’t really mean serverless, servers are still used, it just means that you as a company don’t need to worry about the cloud server-side of computing, memory, CPU etc.
It is a pay-as-you-go model that allows a service to only use the CPU and memory when it’s needed and it’s on-demand 24/7 whenever you need it.
From a finance perspective there are a number of advantages:
There are a few things to understand about serverless that complicates an implementation.
Firstly there is vendor lock-in. Once you start down the serverless route you need to choose a vendor and stick with it. The code isn’t easily transferable.
These are the different flavours of serverless:
The next consideration is that you can’t just start using serverless, you need to have a serverless element to your cloud strategy where new software development projects build with serverless in mind.
Serverless isn’t for everyone. When a request is made to do some “computing work” it takes a second or so to start up. This is fine for most applications but applications that require very low latency, serverless is not suitable.
Finally, skills are expensive in this domain right now and very sought after, so it’s likely you will need to invest in training and maybe consultants to get your development team up to speed.
Kumoco Cloud Manager, ServiceNow Edition can help you make savings up to 40% on your current cloud configuration costs and even a serverless configuration can be mis-managed. With fully automated recommendations your cloud and your cloud costs can be under control at the click of a button.
Kumoco are cloud management experts providing ServiceNow customers with the world’s most comprehensive cloud management solution, powered by and built on the ServiceNow platform.
Do you know companies that buy Amazon AWS, Google GCP and Azure for 90% less than you do?
You may have heard of spot markets in the finance world, but do you know that similar markets are available in AWS, Azure and Google Cloud?
These cloud markets allow anyone to purchase exactly that same cloud capability at c.88%-92% less than list price. If you have ever bought a ticket on TicketMaster, you have used services running on the spot market.
Well like any data centre, there always needs to be enough spare unused capacity to allow for growth. For example, if a very large enterprise or government department decides to migrate 10,000 servers to the cloud, Amazon AWS, etc needs to be ready.
This means that at any one time there is c.20% capacity unused.
To ensure that this capacity can at least pay for some of the cost to maintain it, the spot markets were created.
AWS have EC2 Spot Instances
Azure have Spot VMs
Google have Spot VMs
It all boils down to what is mentioned above, at some point the capacity will be needed for new customers and if it’s being used by you, AWS, Azure etc will want it back.
This is where the Kumoco magic comes into play, Kumoco has a cloud management platform that automatically detects that AWS has requested the service back and automatically buys new space at the current discounted spot price. The Virtual Machine (cloud server) is then automatically relocated for you. You will never know it’s happened. Other than that, you continue to pay “cents on the dollar” for your services.
So that’s the spot markets in the cloud and pretty much everyone can use it.
And… even if your organization decides that the spot markets are not suitable for your business, Kumoco Cloud Manager, ServiceNow Edition can help you make savings upto 40% on your cloud costs with fully automated recommendations that can be implemented at the click of a button.
Kumoco are cloud management experts providing ServiceNow customers with the world’s most comprehensive cloud management solution, powered by and built on the ServiceNow platform.
In its simplest form, FinOps is about making sure you are aware of who is spending IT money in your organization and is that money is being spent wisely? It’s the financial management of your IT estate including the cloud.
When granted that visibility, it gives you the information to create responsibility within your organization, define simple processes and ensure that on an ongoing basis, they are being followed.
As The FinOps Foundation puts it, “[FinOps] is the practice of bringing financial accountability to the variable spend model of the cloud, enabling distributed teams to make business trade-offs between speed, cost, and quality.”
Kumoco has witnessed customers save an average of 35 percent on cloud spending once they have FinOps visibility. For Enterprises spending $5M+ a year, savings are significant.
In the majority of cases, your organization will be paying for things it doesn’t need, such as the following:
Very quickly, the cost savings originally promised by moving to the cloud become eroded and the business case becomes fragile.
The companies that have a clear strategy and approach to using the cloud are the ones that will truly realize the benefits of cloud computing.
There are many products and services on the market that offer their solution to FinOps.
Having a cloud strategy provides good direction, however, implementation is not always that easy.
Nevertheless, at the root of the strategy will always be a solid fully featured cloud management solution. This system:
Once you are comfortable that the cloud is under control, the money you save can be redirected to innovation and product development or just to reduce costs.
Kumoco is a cloud management expert providing ServiceNow customers with the world’s most comprehensive cloud management solution, powered by and built on the ServiceNow platform.
Terry Benge, COO of Kumoco, has been working in the managed service and cloud space for 20+ years all the way back to when it was known as grid computing. Yes, cloud computing has been around that long!
Tagging is a big deal when using public cloud—let’s talk about a few key aspects on this broad topic. Whether an organisation is utilising a single public cloud provider or leveraging the benefits of a multi-cloud strategy, there is a wide variety of resources, services, and costs to manage, analyse, and report on. An important part of this is having a consistent and effective tagging strategy. Tags are metadata values (names and labels given to stuff) that provide identifying information about resources and their purpose. Successfully realising value from tagging has some challenges, starting with simply defining and structuring tags.
Defining the tags to be used and how they are structured should be kept simple: look to how your business is already structured and consider the type of questions you are trying to answer, like “How much do we spend on cloud resources to deliver a service?”
Two key answers that should always be answered by tags: WHAT is this resource for and WHO is responsible for it? Here are some typical examples for what tags can identify:
With a solid tagging strategy in place, your business benefits from valuable visibility and operational capabilities.
Reporting: this broad function includes cost visibility as well as operational status. Well-structured tags provide the ability to generate meaningful and valuable reports, answering key questions like:
Tagging is relatively consistent between providers and there are some differences to be aware of when using multi-cloud.
1. Letter case sensitivity (e.g. ‘ForExample’ vs ‘forexample’) should be consistent and strictly followed. Otherwise, be mindful of the following.
2. Apply no more than 50 tags per resource. This is an AWS and Azure limitation, where GCP allows for 64.
3. Use keys and values with no more than 63 characters. This is a limitation on GCP, while AWS (Key/Value:128/256) and Azure (Key/Value:512/256) allow higher limits.
4. Enforce tags as a policy. These are best applied at the point of deployment/provisioning, whether manual or automatic. Landing Zones, offered by all the public cloud providers, are intuitive and ensure these tagging policies are created and enforced.
5. Apply more tags at the start. You don’t need to limit yourself to just a couple of tags—if you don’t effectively some tags in the future, no harm done.
A successful tagging strategy depends on automation, crucially at the point of provisioning to ensure tags are applied. To support this, good cloud management tooling is important. When considering management tools, look for key functionality such as the ability to apply new tags to existing resources and the ability to filter everything based on tag keys and values.
Kumoco Cloud Manager ensures that you have a successful tagging strategy and offers these key functionalities. Get in touch today for a demo.
With cloud computing growth increasing, enterprises’ cloud consumption is a major contributing factor. From digital currency adoption to prioritising the use of machine learning, there are many existing and emerging technologies that promise both improved operations and reduced costs. Those promised benefits are not always straight-forward to realize.
Let’s look at some of the key challenges and solutions.
Cost-Effectiveness: Visibility and Allocation
The biggest headline opportunity in moving to the public cloud is significantly reducing costs. Promised as being quick, benefiting from economies of scale, and removing the worries of aspects like redundancy and backups, it is easy to jump into the public cloud and spend even more money. Being easy to quickly provision resources, try new technologies, and scale-up, it is a buffet of possibilities that can get out of control if not monitored.
Visibility of costs across a cloud estate is the first major hurdle. For enterprises, knowing the total cost is not enough: they need to understand those costs according to a meaningful allocation breakdown. This could be a breakdown of costs according to projects or programs, cost centers, services, or business units—anything that helps provide visibility and, most importantly, ownership to costs so that they can be managed. Cloud management tools should handle this allocation and visibility of costs automatically, saving human effort from manually slicing-and-dicing within spreadsheets and providing near-real-time visibility.
Resource Optimisation: Automated Recommendations
The use of public cloud technology has a long maturity journey and no matter where an enterprise business is on that, the need to optimise resources without a lot of human effort is critical to keep costs down. Whether a business is relatively new to the public cloud and utilizing just virtual machines on the public cloud or is further along in maturity and using PaaS or serverless technologies via DevOps and/or CI/CD, there are many opportunities to let technology both automatically scale up/down and adjust configurations to be the most cost-effective.
Cloud management tools should support this initiative through continual assessment of deployed resources, providing recommended changes that can either be acted on manually, realized automatically through approved changes or in subsequent deployments that are adjusted for the workload. Enterprises should look for a cloud management tool that supports both the current and future resource types that they consume in the public cloud.
Compliance: Automated Auditing and Remediation
The public cloud typically uses the latest-and-greatest technologies available. This provides an inherent benefit of operating systems, applications, and software that has the latest security considerations and best practices already in place. There are still many factors that a business must still consider and be prepared to address to ensure security compliance. With the ease of deploying resources, either manually or through automated deployments, the need for continual security compliance auditing is a must, especially for enterprises that often have their own policies that need to be enforced and checked.
Enterprises are best served in managing public cloud security considerations through fully automated auditing tools as the volume of cloud resources is not practical for humans to manually conduct audit checks.
Cloud management tools like Kumoco Cloud Manager provide a continual assessment of security considerations at the account level and down to the resources themselves.
Even better, the ability to automatically remediate, or correct, any audit failures is important, as it means security issues are resolved faster, especially when there are already change management processes to consider.
Want to know how cloud management solutions like Kumoco Cloud Manager can support your enterprise? Book a demo.
Cloud computing, as a concept, has been around since the 1960’s. The earliest use cases didn’t see much light until the 1990’s and it took another decade before cloud as we know it today started to take shape. Despite this long history, the transition to true cloud computing for large businesses continues to be both an opportunity and a challenge. When starting to act on that opportunity, it is natural to move through a stepped approach, each being indicative of both business and technology maturity within a business.
Maturity in the use of cloud computing can take many different views. From casual or internal project definitions to defined frameworks like the Cloud Maturity Model by the Open Alliance for Cloud Adoption, there is a lot to consider and act on. In simplistic technology terms, this is often represented as the move from ‘physical to virtual’, where ‘physical’ is often on-premise, utilising cloud infrastructure as a service in a “lift and shift” activity, progressing toward cloud-native technologies and finally at a maturity point of being able to proactively adopt emerging technologies.
Initial phases are often delivered through manual processes and actions that do not leverage the benefits of automation or software tools. While such tooling may seem like overkill, the willingness, or lack of, to use software tools and automation shares a lot of similarities to a business’s willingness to progress the maturity of their cloud computing usage. Here we are in 2022 and massive global enterprises are still using Excel spreadsheets to manually slice-and-dice to understand their cloud computing costs. Businesses employ teams of people to conduct repetitive, laborious tasks resulting in 100s of hours of work that is no longer necessary.
Psychology tells us that we resist change because it takes us out of our comfort zones, even when that can make things more difficult for us; and so it is with progressing in cloud maturity. The amount of effort in making the first colossal shift to cloud computing, that first “lift and shift” type activity, can create apprehension that continued progress will be even more hard work—because it was done manually, without the benefits of software tooling and automation. In this we recognize that continued cloud maturity requires moving beyond manual tasks, embracing software tools and automation that free up employees to do meaningful and valuable work that we are better suited to.
Even in the first “lift and shift” activities, software tooling can simplify and accelerate cloud migration. When there are so many options, why spend months, even years, analysing the required compute capacity to migrate to cloud, over-analysing size and compute-type requirements in an attempt to get it right? One of those options is to simply move everything and then let software tooling take care of sizing and capacity automatically—with little to no human involvement required. Sounds scary? Yes, we resist change, even when we know it is likely to be better for us.
Want to know more about how software tooling and automation can accelerate your cloud adoption?
Get in touch to explore Kumoco Cloud Manager and save 100s of human hours with our state-of-the-art automation.
As a result of the digital shifts in recent years, SMEs across the globe have been accelerating their adoption of the cloud. 81% of tech companies have at least one application currently hosted on the cloud. Beyond that, cloud spend is also increasing rapidly, as more businesses fully embrace cloud solutions. Cloud spend grew in 2021 by 21.7%, making up an ever-increasing percentage of IT spending. In this post, the reasons why any small to medium-sized business should consider using a cloud management platform will be reviewed.
As the cloud estates of small and medium-sized companies continue to increase, continuously managing and optimizing them can become burdensome. This is especially true for organizations that lack the resources to hire a dedicated cloud engineer. On average, an organization can reduce their cloud spend by up to 40% through the use of a cloud management platform. But it goes beyond that, here are a few reasons SME’s should consider implementing a cloud management platform:
As the complexity of applications for technology companies continues to grow through the addition of new features, such as artificial intelligence—so does the range of cloud services they require. Leading companies, such as Salesforce, are implementing powerful new features in partnership with AWS, like automatic call transcription for its call centers and Alexa for Business. As smaller companies start to compete with such extensive feature sets, they are required to manage a complex collection of services across providers and geographies.
The average cloud engineer in the US makes $118,000 per year. For an average small to medium-sized organization, this cost can be prohibitive. CTOs and other IT leads are often required to manage an organization’s cloud estate themselves. This can quickly become a cumbersome process if done manually and usually requires extensive research to conduct properly.
Cloud management platforms provide an easy and cost-effective way for SME managers to manage their cloud instead, without the need of a cloud engineer. With a management system, SME’s have a complete overview of their cloud services, as well as AI-powered cost and compliance recommendations that can be implemented at the touch of a button.
External organizations typically take 90 days to perform a full cloud audit. The same insights on platforms, such as Kumoco Cloud Manager SME, are available immediately. Instead of searching for a cloud spend consultant that you can trust, many of the same recommendations will be available immediately, ready for you to implement. Leading platforms not only assist with overall cloud spend, but offer additional benefits, such as timely notifications, forecasting abilities, and compliance management.
As organizations serve multiple geographic markets, cloud compliance becomes a concern. More governments are requiring that firms store specific data within certain geographies to protect the privacy of their citizens. This is especially true for financial organizations. Leading cloud managers are able to detect these compliance issues and propose changes to ensure alignment with relevant standards.
For more information and further reading, the Google compliance resource center provides details on the topic relating to specific countries and jurisdictions.
As cloud spending continues to consume more of the IT budget, so does the importance of managing these costs effectively. In 2021, cloud costs were estimated to make up 32% of IT budgets at organizations. Beyond this, these costs are even higher for high growth software-focused organizations. Managing this spending effectively can have a massive impact on profits. Cloud management platforms enable significant cost savings on the critical services that SMEs rely on, from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, all at the press of a button.
While managing an ever-growing cloud estate can be a challenge for business leaders, using the right cloud management platform can enable significant cost savings. By constantly monitoring and providing opportunities to reduce costs and ensure compliance, Kumoco Cloud Manager SME allows small to medium-sized organizations to use the same AI-powered platform that enterprise businesses rely on. Get back to the important tasks by eliminating manual audits. Start using a cloud management platform today.
As more businesses migrate to the cloud, relying on AWS for their server infrastructure — understanding detailed billing reports can be a challenge. In 2020, 79% of technical professionals stated that managing cloud spend is a challenge at their organisation.
In this post, the topic of how to read your AWS bill to understand where costs are arising from will be explored.
Why You Should Regularly Check Your AWS Billing Report
As firms scale the number of customers that they serve, cloud expenses often continue to grow. In the software industry, as an example, cloud costs typically make up 50% of the cost of revenue. In addition to this, organizations typically exceed their committed cloud spend forecast by 20%. Allowing these costs to go unchecked can have a massive impact on financial performance come year-end.
Ensuring that you take the time regularly to review your AWS billing report — in detail — can prevent such overruns.
How To Access Your AWS Billing Report
Before you can read and analyze your AWS billing report, you first need to access it. It is available through the AWS Management Console under the Billing and Cost Management section. This guide from the AWS documentation is helpful in case you have any difficulty navigating to the correct location.
Under the bills page, you will be able to see exact details broken down by service, server location, and usage type. The level of granularity should be that pictured in the image below.
What Information is Included on a Detailed Billing Report in AWS
To properly understand billing in AWS, it is important to understand the different cost driver categories. Amazon will bill you per hour when using compute services such as EC2, and per GB for storage services such as S3. These are outlined below.
AWS Service
AWS provides organizations with a wide range of available services. From the storage of files through the S3 service, to enabling blockchain applications with Amazon Managed Blockchain.. To understand your bill, you need to be clear on what these services mean for your organization. Some of the most used services include:
Your bill will detail the exact service that is being used and the amount of usage for that particular service, as well as the exact cost (minus any discounts).
AWS Locations
Beyond services, your cloud configuration may also be utilizing multiple locations. Your bill will detail budgetary spending broken down by server location.
Pricing in AWS varies between Regions and Availability Zones. Locations in North America and India tend to have the lowest costs, while locations in South America and Australia tend to be the most expensive. The difference between North Virginia and Sao Paulo, for example, is over 50%. By taking this into account when planning your AWS services, you can achieve significant cost savings.
Cloud managers, such as Kumoco Cloud Manager, can automatically rebalance your services to low-cost regions.
Usage Terms and Compute Savings Plan
AWS offers discounts for companies that can commit to longer-term usage. For machine learning and compute services, such as EC2, AWS offers discounts when you commit to one or three-year terms. If your cloud needs are relatively fixed, you can explore one of these pricing options to reduce your overall spending.
Depending on your exact commitment, any relevant discounts will also be listed in your AWS bill.
Making Use of The Information
Once you understand what you are being charged for by AWS, you can begin to take steps to fully understand what your organization is making use of and where savings can be achieved.
This can often be a complex process. Cloud Managers, such as Kumoco Cloud Manager, can save you significant amounts of both time and budget by automatically suggesting opportunities to save.
There are numerous advantages to becoming an Azure Expert Managed Services Provider (MSP). This prestigious designation is an endorsement from Microsoft that your company is one of the most capable and high-fidelity Azure MSPs – and that’s a coveted differentiator.
Companies that achieve Azure Expert MSP status can expect accelerated revenue growth, the creation of new revenue streams, and first-class access to Microsoft co-sell engagements and MSP business support.
Businesses want partners that they can count on as Managed Service Providers (MSPs), which have a lot to deliver.
Agree with this or not, certifications are a key indicator that MSPs are invested in their customer’s success. For MSPs offering cloud management on Microsoft Azure, Expert MSP Certification is a critical avenue to drive revenue.
One key aspect of certification is the tooling provided to customers by their MSP. Customer portals not only need to feel intuitive and easy to use, but they also need to offer a variety of practical capabilities.
A common misconception is that all cloud users must or should use the native cloud provider portals.
For MSPs with fully managed offerings, this is not the case and customer’s users need an interface that supports them in understanding and acting on their cloud accounts.
The right tool has a lot to deliver on:
Platforms like ServiceNow provide these through proven track records and enable partners like Kumoco to bring world-class cloud management capabilities to the table.
Underlying capabilities like workflow processes, automation, and orchestration are provided by enterprise platforms.
With the right tooling, customer interactions are more efficient and effective — and that is an important consideration when looking at passing an audit for being an Azure Expert MSP.
Ready to go, out-of-the-box capabilities offered by the cloud management expertise of Kumoco Cloud Manager on ServiceNow act as accelerators to meeting audit requirements, shifting expectations of year-long implementation timelines to as little as six weeks.
With ServiceNow partners, you can count on to bring effective tooling. You can accelerate revenue growth through the opportunities provided by Microsoft Azure Expert MSP Certification.