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Cost management for cloud services

Every Cent Counts

Article from ADMIN 76/2023

By Holger Reibold

Cost management for clouds, containers, and hybrid environments tends to be neglected for reasons of complexity. The open source Koku software shows some useful approaches to this problem, although the current version still has some weaknesses.

Cloud services generally have the reputation of achieving significant cost advantages over on-premises installations. However, practical experience shows that many companies fail to estimate the expenses they will incur and the expenses that will arise during ongoing operations. In this context, they also fail to analyze existing services to identify a potential for optimization.

Cloud costs can only be meaningfully evaluated by comparing them with the value they generate; that is, optimizing cloud expenses is always related to optimizing applications and balancing performance and cost. Optimization depends on understanding the application performance and the value of all workloads running in the cloud.

In this respect, it is no surprise that solutions in the fields of cost, performance, and capacity management are becoming increasingly important – especially with the cloud and application sides combined. Koku [1] aims to identify and bundle cost data from different sources. The result is a database that supports decisions regarding utilization and potential optimization opportunities. Koku not only records and analyzes costs, but also forecasts of cost trends.

Project Koku

Koku is open source software for cost management of clouds, containers, and hybrid cloud environments. The software is designed to identify, centrally bundle, and analyze the pertinent cost data associated with various services. In doing so, the cost specialist pursues the overriding goal of transparency, recording expenses where they are incurred and mapping these expenses across the cloud.

By bundling and analyzing these costs, including their development, over time, you can draw conclusions about the potential for optimization. Additionally, unnecessary expenses are identified with forecasts for cost developments. Koku visualizes the various data,

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