Efficiently manage your AWS environment as you scale

Getting started with Amazon Web Services (AWS) is fast, easy and ostensibly free. Anyone with a credit card can spin up compute and storage resources and, in a few clicks, have a simple software application up and running. The ease of getting started made AWS the cloud provider of choice for developers across the globe.

But getting started with a simple use case and efficiently scaling cloud management to develop and support workload-intensive functions with a global team of engineers are very different tasks. As a company grows, environments bloat with excess infrastructure, and cloud costs quickly get out of hand. VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth® will help you efficiently manage AWS costs as you scale.

 

Provide visibility with business context

When cloud costs first become a problem, most organizations will look to AWS tools to figure out where they spent their money. This can be a great starting point for getting visibility into your costs. But what happens when you need to understand those costs within the context of your business? What if, for example, you need to know how much was spent on compute resources for only one of your applications? Or one of your lines of business? Or by one of your engineering teams? To answer these questions, you’ll need the ability to accurately organize all the resources in your environment (even untaggable resources) into these groups. VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth Perspectives enable this, providing the business context that’s needed to get actionable insights from your data.

Reallocate containerized costs

One of the biggest obstacles for organizations leveraging containers is accurately reallocating those costs to business groups that incurred them. VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth looks inside your containers and determines how much of each shared resource is being used by each of your services or applications, so you can reallocate your containerized costs just like you can with traditional application costs. VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth supports Kubernetes and Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), two of the most popular cloud orchestrators on the market today.
 

Perform chargeback/showback

After getting complete visibility into all your cloud costs, you can use the VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth billing rules and custom line items features to perform showback or chargeback, accurately reallocating costs to the business groups that incurred them. These cloud management capabilities are critical for driving accountability with software developers and establishing a FinOps culture in your organization.
 

Rightsize resources to meet business goals

VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth rightsizing recommendations are built transparently on user defined business goals. Users can create custom efficiency targets, so the recommendations align with your business’s key performance indicators (KPIs). Set performance thresholds that make sense for your business, and take advantage of advanced filtering capabilities and region visibility.
 

Purchase, optimize and manage Reserved Instances and Savings Plans

If you have any consistency in your cloud usage month over month, it makes sense to purchase Reserved Instances (RIs) or Savings Plans (SPs) to cover that consistent usage and reduce its cost. But many organizations get caught up in the complexity of purchasing commitment-based discounts such as RIs and SPs. VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth removes this complexity by providing the modeling, optimization and amortization capabilities needed to give confidence in purchasing decisions, maximize usage of your discounts, and determine the right mix of RIs and SPs for your organization.
 

Centralize governance with policy-based controls

A large, decentralized team of engineers with flexibility to develop applications using the resources they prefer opens the possibility for misalignment with company policies and industry standards. Building a centralized governance team, such as a cloud center of excellence (CCoE), is a great solution, and VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth delivers the tools that CCoE leaders need to set guidelines, flag wasteful or out-of-policy behavior, and ensure adherence to AWS best practices and Center for Internet Security (CIS) standards. The VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth policy engine does not require any coding, so any business user can create and manage policies without relying on limited coding resources.
 

Learn more

Ready to get started on your cloud management journey? Visit us online today and sign up for a free trial of  VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth.

 

My favorite part of [VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth] is the level of organization within the platform—it allows you to manage multiple accounts, which has been hugely useful for us. There are limited views, as well as holistic ones, which is key when you have as many subsidiaries as we do.
— Charmaine Honeycutt, Senior Director of Operations, Ziff Davis

       CERTIFICATIONS:

Figure 1: VMware (CloudHealth) is an AWS partner.

What the VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth by VMware Suite can do for you

  • Provide visibility with business context
  • Reallocate containerized costs 
  • Perform chargeback/showback
  • Rightsize resources to meet business goals 
  • Purchase, optimize and manage Reserved Instances and Savings Plans
  • Centralize governance with policy-based controls
  • Strengthen your security posture