Financial Governance with Maestro. Step 1: Planning

Costs management and optimization are one of the keystones for any organization hosting their environment in Cloud. Meanwhile, providing the capability to review, control, and plan Cloud expenses is among the core tasks set for modern Cloud Management Solutions.

Gartner has developed a Guidance Framework which describes in detail the steps, tools and procedures to be used for Public Cloud IaaS and PaaS costs management and optimization.

One of the core ideas is that cost optimization is the task and priority set not only for one dedicated department – this is a common goal that can be reached by effective collaboration of different teams within a single organization. Thus, it suggests not only focusing on the operational part but also provides recommendations on cost optimization steps that can be made from architecture, governance, application and DevOps perspective.

Once each team may have their own toolset used to fulfill the daily tasks, synchronizing all the activities may be tricky. For multi-cloud environments, this goal becomes even more challenging.  And this is where Maestro hits the stage.

Maestro is a Cloud Management Solution that successfully faces lots of the expectations from the modern business, with Cost Management and Optimization being among its top priorities. It uses the “on the side” governance approach, which enables the direct access to the Cloud management interfaces for the users, with the user requests passing through the configured policies. According to Gartner, this is the preferable approach for setting up effective financial governance, as it allows agility and flexibility typically expected from the Cloud-based infrastructures.

Maestro is an enterprise solution which means not only the capability to control and monitor huge multi-tenant hybrid infrastructures. This also means that a big part of the enterprise challenges can be faced from within a single entry point.

With this and following posts, we will investigate what it can offer in Managing and Optimizing costs for Cloud, as compared to Gartner’s framework.

Spoiler: Maestro can help with the majority of the points listed in the Framework: 

The scheme above is based on the original Gartner's Framework for Managing and Optimizing Costs of Public Cloud IaaS and PaaS.

Step 1: Planning

Planning is the initial stage of any process, and its quality and accuracy are the top factors influencing the success of the whole process. When it comes to finance, planning sets up a baseline against which you can measure actual costs and see whether your optimization strategies work.

On the Planning step, Maestro can be helpful in three areas:

• Most planning steps are performed outside Maestro, as they include, mainly, taking organizational and architecture decisions. However, once the planned budget is agreed, Maestro Budgets will make sure that you keep to the expected limits.
  
  The Budgets functionality allows responsible users set up a multi-layered system of monthly financial expectations. A budget can be set for the whole Cloud infrastructure, irrespective of the Cloud provider, for a specific Cloud, and a specific region within this cloud.  If you have several environments and have specific cost expectations from each of them, you can tag the resources according to their environment, and set a tag-based Budget. Combining these settings, you can reach quite a tight control over the actual expenses.
  
  Budget notifications will let you know once you reach a specific level of expenses, so that you can react properly in case the cost get too large. Moreover, initial control can also be performed by Maestro – and once the Budget limit is reached, it can start requesting approvals for new resources creation, deny any new resources, or even stop all instances within the depleted budget’s scope.
  
  
  
  

• Once the planning is made, deploying pilot application allows to initially align the expectations with the actual consumption. Maestro provides out-of-the-box utilization, costs and performance tracking engines that make estimating the pilot app easy.
  
  You can find the overview of these engines in the post, describing the Track step.

• To assist with fitting the expected budgets, Maestro also provides the forecasting functionality. It analyzes the expenses for the infrastructure that already exists, and predicts the further changes in these numbers – once a week, in the respective Forecast report.

When the infrastructure and budget are planned and verified, it's time to deploy the main scope of Cloud resources and applications and proceed to establishing effective utilization and costs Tracking, which we will discuss in our next blog post.