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How Wayfinder Helps Teams Forecast, Monitor, and Reduce Cloud Spending

Wayfinder empowers teams to forecast, monitor, & reduce cloud costs with predictive insights, real-time controls, & efficient provisioning.

Category
Cloud
Time to read
2 minutes
Published
December 10, 2024
Author
Celeste Groenewald

Managing cloud costs is challenging, especially as organisations scale across single and multi-cloud environments. Wayfinder simplifies this process with proactive features that help teams forecast expenses, monitor predictive costs in real time, and reduce unnecessary spending. This blog covers key Wayfinder tools - like predictive cost visibility, real-time cost insights, and controlled provisioning policies - and how they empower teams to optimise cloud spending without sacrificing productivity.

Key Takeaways

Wayfinder enables predictive cost visibility, helping teams estimate expenses across cloud providers to avoid budget surprises.

Cost estimates during provisioning allow developers to see financial impacts upfront, reducing unexpected spending.

Wayfinder’s provisioning policies set precise limits, optimising deployments and minimising unnecessary cloud costs.

Forecast Cloud Spending

Cloud spending can often catch teams by surprise, as costs usually become visible only after they’re incurred, making cost management a reactive rather than proactive task. Predicting future costs is challenging, especially when estimating which resources will be provisioned and in what quantities.

Wayfinder’s Cloud Access Configurations tackle this by enabling predictive cost visibility. Platform teams can activate cost estimation, providing product teams with upfront insights to proactively manage cloud resource costs, reducing the likelihood of unexpected charges across AWS, Azure, and GCP environments.

Monitor Costs as you Build

When provisioning resources, teams can quickly lose track of associated costs, leading to unplanned overspending.

Wayfinder incorporates real-time predictive cost insights into the provisioning process. Developers can view the estimated costs of node pools before finalising provisioning, enabling smarter decisions that take cost impact into account.

Avoid Costly Sprawl

Without careful planning, cloud environments can experience costly sprawl due to inefficient resource usage and unplanned resource deployment.

Wayfinder’s provisioning policies help prevent this by scoping policies to specific workspaces and stages (such as production or development). These policies control regions, limit the number of clusters or node pools, and ensure resources are only provisioned when necessary, minimising the risk of over-provisioning and inefficiency.

The example below demonstrates these policies in action:

  • Greyed-out policies indicate that certain resources aren’t available in the user’s selected region.
  • Cost warnings signal that estimated costs exceed allowable limits, prompting the user to adjust their configuration before provisioning

Empower Teams to Manage Costs

Cloud costs are often overlooked until after product delivery, rather than being integrated into the process from the start.

Wayfinder supports a unit economics approach to cloud spending, giving teams granular controls and visibility. They can identify unused resources to delete, create temporary environments with automatic expiry, and effectively reduce costs by fully leveraging an OpEx model. This integration empowers teams to make cost management a consistent part of their workflows.

The examples below illustrate these features in action:

  • Creating ephemeral clusters that automatically delete upon expiration.
  • Viewing clusters to identify and remove unused ones.

Conclusion

Appvia Wayfinder equips teams with the tools they need to proactively manage cloud spending, from forecasting costs to monitoring and controlling resources during provisioning. By enabling predictive cost visibility, real-time insights, and precise provisioning policies, Wayfinder helps organisations avoid budget overruns and optimise cloud usage across multi-cloud environments. With granular controls and automation, teams can integrate cost management seamlessly into their workflows, ensuring efficient, cost-effective cloud operations without compromising on productivity.

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