Cloud costs comprise about 20% of IT spending, and no one wants a shockingly high bill.
As managing cloud expenses grows, companies increasingly emphasize optimizing their cloud expenditure. According to Global Industry Analysts spending on public cloud services is expected to reach around $800 billion by 2027. However, managing costs is tricky because assets are scattered across different clouds, and most solutions only offer reactive monitoring. It’s time to bridge the gap between cost control and business success. Having a robust cloud strategy is of the utmost importance, and fintech organizations like Indium Software can assist you in managing and developing the right strategy for your cloud needs. Read how Indium can assist.

FinOps for Cloud Cost Optimization & Multi-Cloud Cost Monitoring

You have undoubtedly gotten that CALL from the CFO, Finance team, and the money inspectors from the management inquiring about your monthly cloud spending if you’ve managed a cloud data platform. And it usually comes like this:

1. Seriously, what on earth is happening with our cloud usage? Did someone leave a money faucet open?
2. Are we just flushing money down the drain with this cloud service? Did a bunch of spendthrifts infiltrate our company overnight?
3. Why is our cloud costs out of control? Do we have predictive analytics tools or solutions available to help forecast our future cloud costs?

And trailed by too many French and Latin words!

Challenges in one infographic!

FinOps is like having a financial guru for your cloud expenses. It helps you keep track of all your cloud assets and manage them from one place. You can monitor your cloud usage and see where your money is going. Predictive data analysis by co-relating cost, revenue, and business metrics assists customers in achieving unit economics and understanding how specific units and/or customers impact cloud metrics, including cost, utilization, and performance! Using FinOps, businesses can save a ton of money, around 40% to 50%, 99.95% Uptime, and 100% accurate cost center mapping, according to Gathr, while making better plans and budgets.

1. Inform: Get real-time visibility of your cloud costs and understand what’s driving them. See a detailed breakdown of your spending patterns, allocations, budgets, forecasts, and analytics.

2. Optimize: Use the insights from the “inform” phase to make intelligent adjustments. Fine-tune your configurations, find and eliminate underutilized services, uncover potential discounts, and compare costs across different workloads.

3. Operate: Put your goals into action. Share spend data with stakeholders, optimize instance sizes, establish cloud governance, and automate processes. Make cloud operations integral to your design and development, ensuring a robust and cost-effective system. Implement governance mechanisms to monitor your cloud infrastructure, estimate costs, and conduct continuous audits.

Multi-Cloud Cost Monitoring allows organizations to effectively track and manage their cloud expenses across multiple cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, GCP, and Oracle Cloud. With Predictive Analytics for Cloud Cost Optimization!

Source: Gathr

What else do you need apart from this dashboard? Predictive Analytics > Model Building > Predictive Model > Real-Time Prediction! Read about data visualization here.

Just transform your cloud spending landscape! Our out-of-the-box cloud cost optimization solution provides enterprises with the following:

1. Unified multi-cloud cost visibility: Monitor and compare costs across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud in one place.

2. Granular visibility into cloud costs: Analyze costs by regions, instances, top services, resources, and operations.

3. Tag compliance: Monitor and improve cost attribution with easy visibility into tagged and untagged resources.

4. Advanced alerts & recommendations: Receive alerts for budget exhaustion, costly instances, and anomalies, with customizable thresholds and integration with enterprise tools.

5. Improved cloud operations and ROI: Optimize containerized workloads, monitor Infra as Code pipelines, and streamline Kubernetes applications for increased automation and observability.

Predictive analysis can be useful for banks to predict customer behavior and preferences. This can help decide what products can be sold to which category of customers and help improve customer experience. It can also predict market fluctuations which help organizations address issues at the right time to get the best outcome. Predictive analysis can also help prevent fraudulent transactions by blocking suspicious access to a customer’s account. Based on customer credit scores, it can predict which customers are likely to miss payments and whom to lend money to, and it plays a significant role in gaining a competitive advantage and helps in better decision-making. Read here

Where to go from here?

All of the above are crucial for effective cost control, regardless of whether you utilize third-party tools, your CDP’s features, a customized set of services, or a combination. It’s rare to find a single solution that solves every problem. I highly recommend forming your team to put the right resources in place to monitor, surface, and optimize cloud costs and usage.

The next time you have a conversation with the CFO, they might say, “Fantastic job! Look at the money we saved this month!”

The post Scaling Up or Down: How Predictive Analytics and FinOps Can Optimize Your Cloud Spending appeared first on Indium.

The 1-Click Deployment Framework for Mendix applications on public cloud(s) simplifies and accelerates the deployment process. With just a single click, you can seamlessly deploy your Mendix applications onto public cloud platforms, unlocking the benefits of scalability, reliability, and cost-efficiency. This framework eliminates the complexities of traditional deployment methods and empowers organizations to launch their Mendix applications quickly and efficiently on the public cloud, enabling faster time-to-market and enhanced agility. Experience the ease and convenience of deploying your Mendix applications with a single click on the public cloud.

Let’s look at a use case and the remedy:

• Mendix MPC customers are unable to employ a flexible custom build process. The Mendix native build pipeline does not let clients implement their own build process because Mendix MPC maintains total control over CI/CD.
• The customer won’t have any control over the application, infrastructure, or security in Mendix MPC. They are forced to pick and choose which security features to use.

Solution:

• Deploying a Mendix application in any public cloud provides one-click deployment, total control over the infrastructure, high availability, and built-in security features. The one-click deployment framework for Indium is reliable and has been tested across multiple clouds with minimal to no adjustments.
• With the most flexible and secure cloud computing environment currently available, such as AWS/Azure/GCP, this architecture gives you the control and assurance you need to safely manage your organization.
• You can become more adept at upholding fundamental security and compliance standards, such as those relating to data localization, protection, and confidentiality, with the help of public clouds.

The rigidity of this structure was examined in this blog post using AWS, the current market leader in public cloud adoption. We can see how the customer has the freedom to choose the infrastructure and the application to be deployed thanks to the powerful integration of the trio Jenkins, Mendix, and AWS.

How to use our own framework to deploy the Mendix application.

1. Set up a VPC with two availability zones and private and public subnets.

2. To secure the nodes and application while preventing external connections, private subnets were created for Kubernetes nodes.

3. We can utilize CloudWatch and Grafana for log monitoring.

4. Configuring Jenkins to automate the CI/CD pipeline.

5. Integrating Jenkins with the Mendix team server.

6. Create a Docker image using the Mendix Docker file and our application code.

7. Upload the Docker image to artefacts like the Docker Hub, ECR, or ACR.

8. Create YAML Scripts to deploy the application. These scripts pass parameters like the database host name and password and the Mendix admin password as secrets using a secrets manager.

9. Using YAML, deploy the docker image in EKS and get the saved images from the artefacts.

10. For high availability and dependability, use EKS’s load balancer, replica sets, and autoscaling.

Also read: How to Secure an AWS Environment with Multiple Accounts

Architectural Overview:

Jenkins begins downloading code from Team servers after a developer clicks a single button, using Mendix docker files and source code to create a docker image that is then used to deploy in Elastic Kubernetes Service in AWS. 

Benefits of Mendix Application Deployment on Public Cloud

 1. Giving the client the ability to take charge of the CI/CD process.

2. The isolated Kubernetes environment allows users to create and administer their own cloud Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), with the potential to increase security.

3. The application auto-scales loads based on traffic and is highly accessible.

4. Logs are simple to monitor, and setting warnings for high CPU usage is simple. 

Conclusion

In conclusion, the 1-Click Deployment Framework for Mendix applications on public cloud(s) revolutionizes the way organizations deploy their applications. By simplifying the deployment process and providing a seamless experience, this framework empowers businesses to leverage the scalability and reliability of the public cloud. With just a single click, organizations can effortlessly launch their Mendix applications, accelerating time-to-market and driving business agility. Embrace the power of 1-Click Deployment and unlock the full potential of your Mendix applications on the public cloud.

The post 1 Click Deployment Framework for Mendix Application on Public Cloud(s) appeared first on Indium.