The Self-Service Data Roadmap

Chapter 19. Cost Management Service

We now have insights deployed in production with continuous monitoring for ensuring quality. The last piece of the operationalize phase is cost management. Cost management is especially critical in the cloud because the pay-as-you-go model increases linearly with usage (in contrast to a traditional buy-upfront, fixed-cost model). With data democratization, where data users can self-serve the journey to extract insights, there is a risk of wasted resources and unbounded costs; data users often spin up resources, and without actively leveraging them, which leads to low utilization. A single bad query running on high-end GPUs can accumulate thousands of dollars in a matter of hours, typically to the surprise of the data users. Cost management provides the visibility and controls needed to manage and optimize costs. It focuses on answering questions like:

• What are the dollars spent per application?

• Which teams are projected to spend more than their allocated budgets?

• Are there opportunities to reduce spend without impacting performance and availability?

• Are the allocated resources utilized appropriately?

Today, cost management presents a few pain points. First, there are many strategies for cost saving based on the specifics of the scenario. Data users are not experts in ever-evolving cloud offerings and aren’t able to come up with strategies to save costs based on workload characteristics and performance SLAs. Second, data users struggle with ...