Reducing Cloud Spend with Morpheus

Many organizations have migrated workloads to the public cloud only to find out that the cloud bill can get out of hand quickly. Cloud visibility and cloud governance are critical to controlling cloud costs. The Morpheus platform includes visibility and governance features that help in reducing an organization’s cloud spend.

Cloud Visibility

Visibility into cloud spending is core to reducing and managing an organization’s cloud spend.

Resource Discovery & Inventory

The resources in a cloud account can quickly grow and without visibility the cloud costs can skyrocket. The resource inventory in Morpheus allows administrators to easily view the resources in connected cloud accounts. This is especially powerful for clouds such as AWS where viewing all the resources in a cloud account is difficult with regional delineations.

Guidance

Provisioning workloads is part science and part art when it comes to sizing workloads. With public cloud workloads being billed based upon the CPU and Memory resources allocated to the workload, it saves money if the instance hardware is rightsized inline with the actual usage. The workload guidance in Morpheus provides administrators with rightsizing recommendations and allows them to easily resize the instance at the push of a button.

Reporting

Reviewing historical cloud spend helps provide organizations with an understanding of their cloud usage. This data provides context for cloud spending discussions and how to ensure that spending is being properly allocated. Morpheus includes several out of the box reports that provide cloud spend data across various clouds and cloud accounts.

Cloud Governance

Understanding past and current cloud consumption is part of the puzzle to cost management. The other part is being able to proactively manage cloud spend with governance.

Budgets

One of the biggest concerns most organizations have is overspending without any bounds. Budgets in the Morpheus platform helps solve this problem by allowing administrators to define a cap on the maximum amount that can be spent by a group, user, role or cloud.

Provisioning Approvals

The benefit of self-service is the ability to request resources as needed. This can be problematic without any guardrails if users request extremely expensive resources. Provisioning approval policies in the Morpheus platform solve this problem by requiring an approval if the request meets certain criteria.

Tag Enforcement

Tagging of cloud resources is a best practice for ensuring that workloads have identifying metadata associated with them. Tags for cost center, project or department tags are a common best practice for cost visibility purposes. Proper tagging of all workloads is a challenging task for organizations with a large cloud footprint. Tag policies in Morpheus allows administrators to define tags that must be applied on provisioned resources within scope.

Power Scheduling

The billing of cloud instances is based upon the amount of resources being consumed or used on a per minute or hourly basis. This is beneficial for testing and development to spin up resources for quick iteration and then destroy the resource or shut it down. Shutting down an instance when not in use can help reduce the monthly cloud bill but remembering to turn instances on and off manually is difficult. Power schedules in Morpheus allows administrators to define a schedule for when an instance is powered on or off.

Resource Expiration

Deploying a cloud resource can be done at the push of a button but ensuring that they are destroyed when no longer needed is a challenge. This often results in a large number of orphaned resources that costs money. Expiration policies in Morpheus allow administrators to define how many days a resource can be leased before it is destroyed. This is especially useful in development and sandbox environments where users are typically granted greater access and control.

Conclusion

In this blog post we looked at cloud visibility and governance features in the Morpheus platform. Looking for more ways to lower cloud cost? Learn how cloud cost optimization features can lower your cloud costs by 30% or more.

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