Sometimes recommendations need a reality check
Cloud cost management products offer an array of savings recommendations, many of which involve modifying or depreciating existing infrastructure. But these recommendations may lack critical details. For example, are the instances part of a backup cluster? Are they running inflexible legacy code that requires compute overprovisioning to accommodate ‘spiky’ usage? In some cases, recommendations may be technically valid, but require so much effort to execute that the resulting cost savings don’t justify the effort.
Engineers evaluating recommendations for the workloads they support take these factors into account, but they have no way to feed workloadspecific details back into their legacy cloud cost management platform. So retaining non-actionable recommendations month-over-month and year-over-year creates a cluttered, untrusted interface. This prevents users from identifying new, high-value cloud cost-savings opportunities they find.
When management and engineering organizations look at the same cloud cost management tool to evaluate savings, inaccurate data creates unnecessary tension and misunderstanding. The resulting frequent ad hoc reviews of savings opportunities can waste precious time, as engineers must clarify to management why they aren’t taking action.
Challenges
- Retaining non-actionable, low-value recommendations causes confusion
- Delays arise from inability to integrate workload-specific details into the platform
- Cluttered, untrusted interface creates misunderstandings and conflict
Benefits
- Hiding & commenting abilities allow focus on highvalue recommendations
- Curating ability sends relevant cost-savings information to the right teams
- Engineers save time and effort identifying and acting on valuable opportunities
Maintain focus on real cloud cost savings
Yotascale’s recommendation feedback feature enables users to permanently suppress invalid recommendations, rather than wade through those that can’t or shouldn’t be actioned. Additionally, users can ‘snooze’ recommendations planned for future delivery, and add comments for increased clarity and traceability. These hiding and commenting capabilities allow engineers to curate and maintain truly actionable recommendations.
These critical functions combine with Yotascale’s contexts feature to drive cost-savings opportunities directly to the relevant engineering teams responsible for building and maintaining workloads. This collaborative approach to cost management reduces the noise and increases the speed with which teams can identify and act on new, high-value cost reduction opportunities.
A single source of truth reveals high-value cost-savings opportunities and distinguishes them from the persistent ‘noise’ of non-actionable recommendations, which are not cost-effective to follow up on.
Improve your cost-savings efficiency
Finally, the Yotascale recommendations interface enables curating of savings opportunities, creating a single source of truth for engineering, management, and finance to reference when asking questions like “how much can we actually save?” and “why didn’t we take this recommendation?” This capability reduces the burden on engineering to provide ad hoc explanations each time cloud cost comes under scrutiny, and increases collaborative cloud cost management across the organization.