With the dramatic increase in the volume, velocity, and variety of data analytics projects, understanding costs and optimizing expenditure is crucial for success. Data teams often face challenges in effectively managing costs, accurately attributing them, and finding ways to enhance cost efficiency. Fortunately, Unravel Data, with its comprehensive platform, addresses these pain points and empowers data teams to unlock their full cost optimization potential—enabling them to run more cloud data workloads without increasing their budget. In this blog, we will delve into the key takeaways from the recent FinOps Camp Episode #1, focusing on the importance of understanding costs, attributing costs, and achieving cost efficiency with Unravel.
Understanding Costs: The Foundation of Cost Optimization
One of the main challenges faced by data teams is gaining deep insights into cost drivers. Traditional observability platforms like Cloudability, or vendor-specific tools like AWS Cost Explorer and Azure Cost Dashboard, often provide limited visibility, focusing solely on infrastructure costs. This lack of granular insights hinders data teams from making informed decisions about resource allocation and identifying areas for cost optimization. Unravel, however, offers a comprehensive dashboard that provides a holistic view of cost breakdowns. This enables data teams to understand exactly where costs are being incurred, facilitating smarter decision-making around resource allocation and optimization efforts.
Accurate Cost Attribution: The Key to Fairness and Transparency
Accurately attributing costs is another hurdle for data teams. Shared services, such as MySQL or Kafka, require meticulous cost allocation to ensure fairness and transparency within an organization. Unravel understands this challenge and provides a solution that simplifies cost allocation. By seamlessly attributing costs to individual users, jobs, teams/departments/lines of business, projects, applications and pipelines, clusters, etc., Unravel enables data teams to break down the proportional costs of shared services. This not only enhances cost tracking but also promotes accountability and fairness within the organization.
Unlocking Cost Efficiency: Recommendations for Optimization
Cost efficiency is the goal of every data team striving for excellence. In the virtual event, Unravel highlighted its powerful feature of identifying inefficiencies within data jobs and providing actionable recommendations for optimization. By analyzing tasks with its AI-powered Recommendation Engine designed specifically for specific platforms like Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery, and Amazon EMR, Unravel can pinpoint resources that have been oversized and lines of code that contribute to performance bottlenecks. Armed with these insights, data teams can collaborate with developers to address these inefficiencies effectively, resulting in improved resource utilization, reduced costs, and accelerated application performance. Unravel’s proactive optimization recommendations enable data teams to achieve peak cost efficiency and deliver exceptional results.
Operationalizing Unravel: Going From Reactive to Proactive
Unravel’s platform lets data teams go beyond responding to cost and performance inefficiencies after the fact to getting ahead of cost issues beforehand. Unravel empowers ongoing cost governance by enabling team leaders to set up automated guardrails that trigger an alert (or even autonomous “circuit breaker” actions) whenever a predefined threshold is violated—be it projected budget overrun, jobs exceeding a certain size, runtime, cost, etc. Essentially, these automated guardrails take the granular cost allocation information and the AI-powered recommendations and apply them to context-specific workloads to track real-time spending against budgets, prevent runaway jobs and rogue users, identify optimizations to meet SLAs, and nip cost overruns in the bud.
Conclusion: Unleash Your Cost Optimization Potential with Unravel
Understanding costs, attributing costs accurately, and achieving cost efficiency are critical components of any successful data analytics strategy. In the FinOps Camp Episode #1, Unravel showcased its ability to address these concerns and empower data teams to optimize costs effectively. By providing in-depth insights, seamless cost attribution, and proactive optimization recommendations, Unravel enables data teams to understand at a deep level exactly where their cloud data spend is going, predict spending with data-driven accuracy, and optimize data applications/pipelines so organizations can run more high-value workloads within existing budgets. Unravel unlocks your cost optimization potential and maximizes the value of your data analytics efforts. Together, we can transform cost optimization from a challenge into a competitive advantage.
Next Steps:
- Schedule a demo with Unravel to discover how it can revolutionize your cost optimization efforts..
- Download Eckerson Group’s Governing Cost with FinOps for Cloud Analytics