Author:Dave Rollins, Director of Technical Product Marketing for Cross-Cloud Services at VMware.

Understanding and controlling your cloud spend is a struggle every business will encounter. According to a recent IDC study, one of the top challenges IT decision-makers face is controlling cloud costs. For most organizations, the issue is not having complete visibility into all their cloud resources. This could be due to other departments going around IT to fund their development projects or a recent M&A leading to adopting a new cloud provider. In any case, organizations have a hard time controlling what they cannot see.

There are two key areas when it comes to cloud cost:

Understanding your total cloud spend
Ensuring your workloads are sized correctly
Understanding Your Total Cloud Spend

With each cloud provider comes a separate set of tools and skills needed to generate resource utilization and cost-based reports on their platform. Retrieving and consolidating meaningful data from each provider takes time to generate and analyze. As a result, these reports are often outdated once they have been compiled. In addition, the report may not be a full picture of what the entire company is spending due to other accounts outside the IT organization’s visibility.

This is where VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth, can help. VMware Aria Cost is a robust multi-cloud management platform that helps your organization simplify financial management, streamline operations, and improve cross-organizational collaboration, through consolidated visibility and reporting across your entire cloud environment. VMware Aria Cost provides visibility into AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, Alibaba Cloud, VMC on AWS (currently in beta), and data center environments. Through one tool, you have complete cost visibility into your multi-cloud environment across your entire environment: on-premises, public, hybrid, or multi-cloud.

The platform ingests and aggregates data from the multiple data streams you use to provide a holistic view of your applications, infrastructure, and business. Using open APIs, VMware Aria Cost seamlessly collects data from cloud providers. It also connects and pulls data from third-party tools you use for application performance management, configuration management, and the like, allowing you to use VMware Aria Cost as your single source of truth for multi-cloud management.
This video provides more details and demonstrates using Aria Cost to understand costs in a multi-cloud environment.

Ensuring Your Workloads are Sized Correctly

Another important aspect of controlling cloud costs is ensuring your workloads are sized appropriately before and after migrating to a public cloud provider. Often customers will overlook this step and be surprised with a higher cloud bill than they had originally anticipated. In some cases, overprovisioned workloads can be missed in the private data center because there may not be a chargeback model or other costing mechanism associated with it. However, once these workloads are moved into a metered environment, they quickly become apparent, and customers are paying for resources their applications are not consuming. This has led to some customers moving workloads back to their on-premises environment with the notion that the public cloud is too expensive.

As mentioned, there are two aspects to this. The first is to ensure the workloads migrating to the cloud are right sized before moving them to the cloud. With VMware Aria Cost, organizations can gain visibility into the VMs running in their on-premises data center and receive recommendations on how to size them correctly. Once the VMs are running optimally, a Migration Assessment can be performed at the data center level. Creating a new Migration Assessment will show the current cost to run the workload on-premises and compare moving it to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, for both on-demand and reserved resources.

The second aspect is that once the workload has been moved to the cloud, keeping tabs on the VMs to ensure they continue to be sized correctly. This ensures they run at peak performance and use the most economical instances. With VMware Aria Cost, rightsizing is currently provided for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. The platform uses past performance to make recommendations on what the appropriately sized instance would be and the difference in cost. This is a more cost-efficient approach to cloud, allowing you to pick the right instance size to support your applications.

Conclusion

VMware Aria Cost helps organizations take control of their cloud spend and their multi-cloud journey. We have only scratched the surface of what VMware Aria Costs offers, and we will explore them in future posts around Unified Management and Operations. To get started and see how your organization can benefit from VMware Aria Cost, sign up for a 14-day trial here.

In the next post, we will look at a faster way to cloud by utilizing a common infrastructure in private and public clouds. This allows for some unique opportunities to accelerate your cloud journey and find your way to cloud smart.