Introduction
We recently sat down with Jeff Harris, Director of Strategy & Operations at Yotascale, to learn more about the intricacies of cloud cost allocation and to discover what's new and exciting in Yotascale's product suite.
Jeff, could you explain what Yotascale cloud cost allocation is and why it's important?
Absolutely, Kevin. Yotascale's cloud cost allocation system goes beyond traditional reporting, which usually focuses on basic attributes like tags. We allow the grouping of different attributes together to define what an entity concept is. In other words, we enable businesses to have an accurate and granular breakdown of their cloud costs, right down to the cost of a single product in their dev environment versus their production environment.
So how does this stand apart from using regular tools from AWS or Azure?
Those tools can indeed provide a graph showing a breakdown by an environment tag. But with Yotascale, you have confidence that every cent is allocated somewhere. You can't always have that confidence with AWS or Azure. In many cases, you end up with a partial understanding of your cost because not all resources have the correct tags. So we help businesses tie their costs back to their real entities, and we do this dynamically to match changes in organizational and account structures.
Has Yotascale made any recent improvements to its cost allocation engine?
Yes, we now have a shared cost allocation capability. This allows us to assign costs based on the proportion of total dollars assigned or some other metric. You can't do this with AWS or Azure's tooling. This way, teams can be responsible for the costs they have incurred.
How does this help businesses in practical terms?
This is beneficial for cost chargebacks, where an IT team that manages the cloud infrastructure needs to rebill that cost out to the organization. It's also great for tax advantages as you can write off R&D costs if they're classified correctly.
What would you say are the three most important things about this cost allocation feature?
The three most important things are: confidence that every cent is allocated somewhere, customizable granularity determined by you, and the shared cost allocation feature.
What differentiates Yotascale from others who might just dump all their data into a BI tool?
Simply dumping all data into a BI tool can lead to a basic level of allocation and lack of data confidence. Without proper allocation, you can end up either not counting some costs at all or double-counting. Yotascale ensures that every penny is counted once and only once.
Can you tell us more about Yotascale’s product suite?
Yotascale cost management is the name of the product suite, and Yotascale analytics is a module within the suite. The analytics part is dependent on the cost allocation feature. Without accurate and fine-grained cost allocation, we couldn’t provide high quality prediction, cost anomaly detection, and forecasting.
Conclusion
Our discussion with Jeff revealed the depth and breadth of Yotascale's cloud cost allocation system. Their commitment to providing a granular, precise, and dynamic approach to cost allocation makes them a leader in the field. It's clear that Yotascale is at the forefront of optimizing cloud costs for businesses, ensuring that every cent is allocated and accounted for.
