SDSA's Adoption of Cloudability for Superior Cost Management | Samsung SDS

Deployment of solutions in the public cloud has grown at enormous scale. Agility and innovation has pushed these solutions to the cloud with time to market at a faster pace. With the ease of spinning up new resources quickly, costs for these resources can grow just as fast. Without having visibility and awareness on where the spend is happening, teams including business and finance can get a ‘sticker shock’ at the end of the month as the bills arrive. Teams will need to manage their own cloud spend but without tools to assist, it can be an extremely cumbersome task.

Cloudability

SDSA has recently purchased a SaaS solution who is one of the industry leaders in Cloud Financial Management space. This tool is called Cloudability by Apptio. This tool provides a holistic view of cost and usage for our cloud environment and assists IT, finance, and business teams to optimize costs to drive business value of the cloud.
We purchased this tool to help the organization gain visibility into cloud spend, help reduce waste and optimize the environment.

Here are some of the highlights and features of Cloudability:

• Detailed views of cloud spend, trends, build forecasts and budgets, and anomaly detection for unusual and unexpected spend.
• Continuous optimization of your cloud costs – Rightsizing recommendations to reduce operating expenses
• Building reports and dashboards for your specific environment which are customizable, shareable, and provides ability to schedule delivery of reports to your inbox.

Inform: Teams can view costs for all businesses or drill down to specific areas if needed.

Optimize:Cloudability will help identify resources that incur costs that are not in use. Business teams can review and terminate which will reflect on Realized Cost Savings.
Additionally, If they are EC2 instances over-provisioned, it can also identify based on historical data, and recommends that it should be rightsized to optimize the costs.

Operate - Continuously monitor, optimize, and improve cloud spend, make teams accountable for their spend. Teams can create forecasts based on actual budgets. This way you can stay within your allocated budget throughout the year. If there a sudden spikes which affects monthly numbers, you can get alerted on them to immediately to address and take action on these items.

Cloudability Savings Automation

Another component of Cloudability that we leverage is the Cloudability Savings Automation.
The function of this tool assists all member accounts to take advantage of commitment based spend. These commitments are in the form of Compute Savings Plan and Convertible Reserved Instances.

Compute Savings Plan
It is a pricing model to help save us over on-demand pricing

• Commitment based on 1 or 3 years
• Applies to compute (EC2, Lambda, Fargate) regardless of region, instance family, OS.

Convertible Reserved Instances

• Provides flexibility to modify commitments across different EC2 instances to obtain savings over on-demand

The Cloudability Savings Automation tool continuously scans our environment and purchases necessary SP and CRIs to obtain maximum savings while providing a high level of coverage. This solution purchases the Savings Plan and RI’s on the Master Payer Account so that every member account can benefit from these savings.

2023 Savings Summary

Over the course of 2023, SDSA has established this FinOps culture to provide the organization with cost savings and optimization. As you can see, in 2023, SDSA has saved over $2.8MM. That is approximately $236k/month utilizing these various savings methods.
As teams become more cost conscious, they will be able to reduce their costs even further, while optimizing the resources they consume to achieve even greater savings.

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