Key Insight: Fast cost data can mean more frequent Data Ingestion, which leads to faster decision-making ability in a FinOps practice. Helpful Anomaly Management means less noise and more news; Some vendors take a curated approach and surface fewer anomalies, while others deliver more alerts and allow you to dial down as needed.
At Google Next ‘24, Google Cloud announced several new FinOps features.
J.R. Storment sat down with Sarah McMullin and Charan Kuchibhotla to get the details about these updates and how they help FinOps Practitioners.
1. Faster billing data updates
Google Cloud streams their billing data, and they have reduced end-to-end latency by 30%, so Practitioners get accurate real-time data in 24 hours, reducing reliance on estimated costs. Getting billing data into the hands of practitioners more quickly enables most FinOps activities, including accelerated responses to changes in cloud costs through tracking actuals to plan. Read more from Google.
FinOps Landscape
In addition to Google Cloud, these cloud service providers offer programmatic billing data for use in FinOps:
2. AI-powered anomaly detection
Google announced the launch of anomaly detection in preview with no need to configure anything to get started. While some providers choose to support various settings for the practitioner to adjust, Google has taken a curated approach towards anomaly detection by finely tuning their powerful algorithm internally to reduce irrelevant noise to customers. After testing their anomaly detection algorithm with a wide set of customers, Google is expecting to add alerting functionality. Included in the announcement is granular root level analysis allowing the practitioner to quickly get to the top services, region and SKUs causing the anomaly assisting the practitioner to reduce the time to resolution for anomalies. Read more from Google.
FinOps Landscape
In addition to Google’s native offerings, here is a sample of FinOps vendors who currently offer some form of support for Anomaly Management.
- Amazon Web Services
- Apptio Cloudability
- CloudZero
- Kubecost
- Microsoft Azure
- Nordcloud Klarity
- Tanzu CloudHealth
- Ternary
- Vega Cloud
See the FinOps Landscape for more tools with support for Anomaly Management.
3. Improved Committed Use Discount (CUD) analysis, management, and recommendations.
Google added a new integration within its FinOps Hub providing Unified Committed Use Discount (CUD) Analysis. Google unifies price and quantity datasets for analysis and asks about future plans that may impact commitment recommendations. Offering both an optimal and a conservative recommendation, allowing the practitioner to choose their approach to CUDs. The Hub shows the ROI of purchases and what you would have spent if you hadn’t made any commitments, enabling practitioners to track the value of their rate optimization efforts. Granular CUD metadata now brings even more transparency to your Commitment Use Discounts. Unified CUD Analysis also surfaces more recommendations and support for additional types of CUDs providing discounts on Memorystore, AlloyDB, BigTable, and Dataflow. Read more from Google.
FinOps Landscape
These FinOps tools support managing commitment discounts for Rate Optimization.
- Amazon Web Services
- Apptio Cloudability
- CloudBolt
- CloudFix
- CloudKeeper
- CloudZero
- Flexera
- Google Cloud
- HCLTech
- IBM Turbonomic
- Kyndryl
- Microsoft Azure
- Nordcloud Klarity
- ProsperOps
- SoftwareOne
- Spot by NetApp
- Tangoe
- Tanzu CloudHealth
- Ternary
- Virtasant
See the FinOps Landscape for more tools with support for managing commitment discounts.
Closing
Google continues to invest in their FinOps Hub, making it the place where FinOps Practitioners can find everything they need for FinOps analysis within the GCP Console. Real-time data, anomaly detection, and commitment discount management are key ingredients for FinOps success, and the landscape of FinOps tools and services is stepping up to meet those needs.
Topics
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Cloud Provider Updates
