FinOps using SteamPipe

[vishalgoyal16444]

The documentation for the Cost Mod says "Review what AWS, Azure, GCP, and other clouds are costing you".

When we run the mod, we don't get this complete information of the cost being spent for my cloud and which resources are utilized, which are not and how can we optimize costs. Believe you have queries and tables to fetch and show this, but may be this is not done right now ?

Would be very helpful to get this analysis using one of the mods.

Please share your insights on how we could get this.

[cbruno10]

Hey @vishalgoyal16444 , thanks for raising this discussion!

You're correct that the current Thrifty mods, like AWS Thrifty, currently focus on potential cost saving opportunities, but not how much you'd save or how much your current resources cost.

One of our goals is to improve cost reporting information and recommendations in the Thrifty mod, but gathering all of that data and then joining it is no easy task!

As a starting point for AWS resources, we do have a few cost tables like aws_cost_usage, which can be used to view the cost per service, like in this example.

We also have tables like aws_pricing_product, which don't provide specific cost information about resources you're using, but do provide overall price information for specific services, resources, and instance types. This information could then be joined with your current resource data to get estimated costs.

Are there any specific tools (AWS or not) that you use to review your cloud costs? Also, do you have any specific examples of useful queries you'd like the Thrifty mods to contain?

[vtolpadi]

Our cloud practice team uses corestack to review and optimize costs across all hyperscalers. Core stack offers capabilities for cost optimisation, licensing costs etc.

Examples we would love to see are as follows

1. Anomaly detection: Ability to detect, identify, clarify, alert and manage unexpected or unforecasted cloud cost events in a timely manner, in order to minimize detrimental impact to the business, cost or otherwise
2. Idle resources which are not being used and still consuming resources and costs
3. Resource utilization: Ensuring there is sufficient business value for the cloud costs associated with each class or type of resource being consumed. It is necessary to observe a resource’s utilization over time to understand if the performance, availability or other quality metrics are of value for the expense incurred