Chris Santiago, VP Solutions Engineering Unravel Data, shares his perspective on Why Cost governance is so hard for data teams in this 3 min video. Transcript below.
Transcript
Cost governance – a burning issue for companies that are running mission-critical workloads in production, using large amounts of data, and are at the point where they’re starting to see rising costs but they don’t have a handle or know what to do next in order to curtail those costs.
It all starts from the cloud vendors itself, because that’s really the only way we’re going to get true costs. And so the way that cloud companies do this is they have loads of customers. And so it’s going to take them time to batch up all the information about what the resources are consumed for each of their customers. And then when it’s time for billing, they go ahead and they send out a report that’s highly aggregated in nature, to really just show this is how much you were spending. And it comes in as a batch process, right? What you really need is fine-grained, or fine granularity, of where costs are going. But the challenge is, because we’re getting this highly aggregated data from the cloud vendors itself, it becomes challenging.
Now, what do customers do? What they’ll end up doing is they’ll try to do this themselves by capturing whatever metrics that they can. I see a lot of customers do this through manual spreadsheets, trying to track things by job, in a very manual fashion. In fact, one customer that I was working with actually had two full-time, very talented developers doing this just so that way they can get a semblance of where cost is going at a granularity that they wanted. Now, their issue is that this spreadsheet was prone to errors. Things would always change on the cloud vendor side, which would make their reports not accurate. And at the end of the day, they were not getting buy-in from the business.
And so that’s why you can’t use DevOps tools to solve this problem. You need a purpose-built platform built for DataOps teams, and that’s where Unravel comes in. So we’ll be able to take in all this information, provide you the ability to understand costs at whatever granularity you want. And best of all, we’re capturing this as soon as this information comes in. So now you can do things such as accurate forecasting of how resources are being spent. Setting budgets so that we can really understand who’s spending what. Being able to provide chargeback visibility so we can see who the top spenders are and we can actually have that conversation. And most importantly of all, being able to optimize at the job level. So that way we really, truly can reduce costs wherever we would want them to be.
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