From an engineering and development standpoint, one of the most important aspects of cloud infrastructure is the concept of unlimited resources. The idea of being able to get a new server to experiment with, or being able to spin up more servers on the fly to handle a traffic spike is a foundational benefit of cloud architectures. This is handled in a variety of different ways with various cloud providers, but there is one thing that they all share in common:

Capacity costs money. The more capacity you use, the more it costs.

So how do we provide unlimited resources to our development and operations groups without it costing us an arm and a leg? The answer is remarkably simple. Visibility is the key to controlling costs on cloud platforms. Team leads and managers with visibility into how much their cloud based resources are costing them can make intelligent decisions with regard to their own budgets. Without decent visibility into the costs involved in a project, overruns are inevitable.

This kind of cost tracking and analysis has been the bane of accounting groups for years, but there are several projects that have cropped up to tackle the problem. Projects like Netflix ICE provide open source tools to track costs in public cloud environments. Private cloud architectures are starting to catch up to public clouds with projects like Ceilometer in Open Stack, but can be a bit trickier to determine accurate costs due to the variables involved in a custom internal architecture.

The most important thing in managing costs of any nature is to realistically know what the costs are. Without this vital information, effectively managing the costs associated with infrastructure overhead can be nearly impossible.

Daniel Sands

Daniel Sands has been a DevOps Engineer at Ancestry.com since December of 2011. Prior to joining Ancestry.com, he served as the Vice President of Information Technologies at the Enlightened Wealth Institute based in Provo Utah from January 2008 to December of 2011. Mr. Sands holds an M.B.A. with an Information Technology specialization from Western Governers University. His favorite quote is “It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.” - Walt Disney

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