Introducing Collaborative Cost Management for Developers
Tags: devops, cloudcomputing, internaldeveloperportal, cloudcosts
Published: 2023-07-19 16:44:19

[configure8](https://configure8.io/), the internal developer portal that enables your engineering team to move faster and build better software, is excited to announce its newest feature: Collaborative Cost Management.

- Expands responsibility for cloud cost management across the organization and addresses the root cause of cloud cost mismanagement by enabling application and data engineering teams to understand the costs and cost drivers of operating the applications, services (and data pipelines, etc.), and environments they own as well as see costs at the individual squad or team level. Moreover, where appropriate, teams are directly empowered to take action to improve cost efficiency on a self-serve basis while staying within guardrails defined by the platform engineering organization.
- Initially supports AWS and Kubernetes, Azure, GCP and on-prem to be added
- Produced 25% cloud cost savings in initial pilot studies

- Industry analysts estimate 30% of cloud spend may be wasted. Incorporating cost visibility and the ability to safely control costs into developers’ everyday workflow inside their developer portal is an emerging tactic to drive efficiency that complements existing cost optimization tools. According to Gartner® research, Innovation Insight for Internal Developer Portals (February 2022), “By 2025, 75% of organizations with platform teams will provide self-service developer portals to improve developer experience and accelerate product innovation.”

As organizations scale beyond the startup and SMB stage, they tend to shift responsibility for managing cloud costs from the engineering team to an operations team that sits across multiple engineering teams and often implements centrally-administered governance processes and cloud cost optimization tooling. This shift from bottoms-up to top-down management has its advantages, especially as early waste reduction “wins” are achieved; however, it can also introduce new challenges as organizations grow into mid-market companies and especially as they attain enterprise scale. 

Governance processes can rate limit innovation, and centralized teams can struggle to connect cost to the engineering team that owns a service, data pipeline, etc. that drives the cost on a timely basis. This cost attribution challenge can limit the centralized team’s ability to gather important context for decision-making processes and can leave engineers unaware of the costs of the code they own or reliant on coarse grain, delayed data that is imperfect. The combination of governance processes and information delays and gaps can limit progress on savings initiatives and ultimately runs counter to the trend of empowering engineers to efficiently and reliably operate the applications, services, data pipelines, and environments they own.

Collaborative Cost Management by configure8 solves this problem.

By incorporating cost visibility and the ability to safely control costs into developers’ everyday workflow inside their developer portal, collaborative cost management now comes naturally.

With Collaborative Cost Management by configure8, your application and data engineers can:

See, sort and filter the costs of the applications, services, and environments they own broken down by cloud and Kubernetes resources.

Drill down into the cost drivers of a resource as well as see configuration settings and linkages to other resources and dependent environments and services to determine what changes may be appropriate.

Make changes to a selected resource while staying within guardrails your platform engineering team controls and following your existing approval processes (but without incurring the cognitive load of finding scripts and executing them in IAC or waiting in a ticket queue) via Self-Serve Actions by configure8.

Co-founders Jay Crystal and Seth Demsey noted, “We want to help teams foster a culture of collaborative cost management through transparency and self-service without limiting experimentation, agility, or good governance.”

Collaborative Cost Management by configure8 initially supports Amazon Web Services, and the company intends to add additional clouds and on-prem integrations in the future. This solution complements tools and strategies already employed by your DevOps and FinOps teams, such as cost optimizers like Apptio. In fact, savings recommendations from these tools can be integrated into configure8.

Getting started with configure8 is incredibly easy. Free trials to prove value are available as is a liberal free tier for smaller organizations and nonprofits. Learn more at https://www.configure8.io/cost-management

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