The age old mantra is that to control hardware related costs within an organisation, one need to implement a cost management operations function. This worked pretty well in the OnPremise computing world where individual teams had to operate under operational constraints. However, in the Cloud era, organisations are discovering that the older cost control model doesn’t work that well. The new reality is that product development teams have much more power at their disposal to create resources at will on the Cloud, and it is very difficult to implement some sort of throttling on the same. The other alternative is to implement a full Cloud Management Solution that provides much more fine-grained controls, permissions and governance frameworks. However, these solutions are prohibitively expensive and is outside the reach of many enterprises.
So the question boils down to “How can enterprises control costs without implementing a costly Cloud Management Solution”.
Well, the simple answer is: Empower your Developers !! Give the right set of tools into their hands !!
Sounds cliched ? Not really. Let us look at a scenario in a typical organisation. Bessie Richards is a developer in a medium scale organisation and actively uses AWS on a daily basis for development work. She regularly spins up AWS EC2 instances on the Cloud and removes them after use. Once in a while she gets pulled into customer escalation scenarios and forgets to clean up the EC2 instances that she had created on AWS. What is the best way to handle this scenario?
Yes, the Operations team members among you would stand up and tell that there should be a team that would look out for unused resources and notify their owners or cleanup unused resources themselves. Yes, works fine in some cases, but it is quite expensive to put together an Operations team just to perform routine maintenance tasks. There is a better way to tackle this issue. And that is to empower developers and to provide the required information to them on a regular basis.
Let us consider an alternate scenario. Bessie Richards logs into her work environment the next day and she gets an automated greeting from a Slack Bot saying, “Hey Bessie, you had created these instances yesterday. Looks like you forgot to clean them up. Do you want me to clean them up for you”, for which Bessie emphatically replies “Yes” and the job is done.
Welcome to the new generation way of doing DevOps! There is no maintenance overhead, there are no Operations teams that monitor unused resources. There is only one player here and that is the product developer. Rest of the functions are automated. All that the product developer will do is to interface with a system that would work behind the scenes, monitor and perform a set of actions based on their inputs. Developers typically do not like to do boring mundane tasks from the UI and hence the easiest way to ensure compliance is to give them the capability to perform tasks from command-line or Slack.
Now, some of the folks who are used to doing things in the old way would not probably appreciate this. They still do not trust that a developer would be able to take care of themselves. But then, when you are on the look out for cost reduction, these are easy pickings. Automate, Automate and remove the manual efforts from your system.
With some effort, this scenario can be implemented in any organisation. This would require the will and some readiness to embrace change. Look out for another blog from us where we would list the detailed steps that would help you implement Intelligent Cost-Aware DevOps in a very cost-effective manner in your organisation.
Now that you have reached here, talk to us if you would like to implement Intelligent Cost Effective DevOps for your organisation