Optimizing cloud operations and related costs require tight management across multiple disciplines including governance, architecture, business operations, product management, finance and application development.

“A cloud strategy clearly defines the business outcomes you seek and how you are going to get there. Having a cloud strategy will enable you to apply its tenets quickly with fewer delays, thus speeding the arrival of your ultimate business outcomes,” says Donna Scott, research vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.  

Haystream helps you manage and reduce cloud costs by

    • Implementing cloud provider native and 3rd party monitoring tools.

    • Identifying highest priority opportunities and optimizing from most valuable to least.

    • Rightsizing services infrastructure and configurations.

    • Optimizing solution to suite workload.

    • Modernizing applications and services to leverage serverless and Function as a Service (FaaS).

    • Defining and implementing business processes to manage and govern the cloud environment.

    • Mentoring and coaching the skills and practices necessary to keep the cloud environments running efficiently.

The Journey:

Cloud environments enable unprecedented agility and with modern continuous delivery models, the environment is changing rapidly, often throughout a day and this dynamic environment can be difficult to tame. Haystream can helps organizations develop solutions, practices, processes, and an accurate application budget and consumption model to better forecast costs. By implementing a forecasting model, change management procedures, and continuous improvement process, your organization can better anticipate cloud costs on an ongoing basis. Haystream offers #Smartifying thea smart ‘Cloud Cost Optimization Approach’ by understanding the workload requirements and the relevant business processes. This helps uncover the application’s nonfunctional requirements that have an impact on costs. The goal is to identify the precise outcomes that drive the subsequent cloud services design and avoid over-architecting applications.

Key queries include:

  • Data Classification and Availability

    1. What are the relevant data classifications and definitions? i.e., Top Secret, Secret, Confidential, Sensitive, Unclassified? 

    2. What are the data classifications inputs and outputs by workload?

    3. How critical is the integrity of the data?

    4. What are the consequences if data remains unavailable for a period?
    5. What are the consequences of data loss?

  • Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery

    1. What are the application Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO)? 

    2. What are the service escalation procedures and what initiates an escalation? 

    3. Which geographies use the applications/services?

    4. What is the desired high availability/disaster recovery (HA/DR) architecture?

    5. Are there specific requirements related to mean time to repair (MTTR)?

  • Performance

    1. What are the Service Level Agreements (SLA) or service-level objectives (SLO)?

    2. How much compute and memory?

    3. Use, classes, and volumes of storage?

  • Compliance

    1. Does data used or created by the application require compliance with any industry-specific regulatory standard, such as Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) or Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)?

    2. Are there any residency requirements such as must be stored within a country’s border at all times?

  • Technology (Full stack review of service components)

    1. Classify components of the architecture FaaS, PaaS, SaaS, IaaS with legacy requirements.

    2. Supporting tools and services, e.g., programming languages, deployment tools, configuration management.

    3. External dependencies such as external APIs or cloud services.

  • Utility

    1. Are there calendar, weekly, daily, or time based requirements or processing schedules?

    2. What are the calendar, weekly, daily, or time based business requirements?

    3. How is peak utilization scaling handled?

    4. How frequently will the data be accessed?

    5. Do you have active, predictable traffic?

    6. Do you have active traffic with large spikes?
    7. How much consumption are you expecting for your application, and over what time frame?

    8. What’s the expected growth?

The Strategy:

With Haystream, you will

  • Design the most cost-effective architecture for your application – For instance:

    1. If the workload has a high availability target, the architecture must consider the deployment of services that may fail (such as compute or database instances) across multiple availability zones (AZs).

    2. If the availability target is low, the use of a single AZ may suffice.

    3. If the workload has a high integrity target and you can’t afford to lose its data, the architecture should implement cross-region data replication for storage and database services.

    4. If the integrity target is low, same-region replication may suffice.

    5. If the workload has a high confidentiality target, the architecture should implement encryption and other hardening security services or adopt specific components such as a storage gateway.

    6. If the workload is always on and requires minimal tuning of the infrastructure, then the architecture should prioritize application PaaS over IaaS.

    7. If the application has transient or volatile load, can manage latency and time constraints, and operate stateless, then the architecture should prioritize server-less services and a function PaaS (fPaaS).

  • Get the right advisory on 2 types of charging models –

    1. Allocation-based services require users to pre-provision capacity, and cloud providers charge for that provisioned capacity as long as it exists and regardless whether it is used.

    2. Consumption-based services don’t require pre-provisioning and are billed based on units of consumption.

  • Automate forecasting in the Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) Pipeline​.

  • Continuously track, tag and set alerts on anomalies.

Cost Optimization & Management

Gain control of your cloud costs by optimizing your solutions and consistently monitoring cloud usage metrics. Deploy continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) to drive rapid capability delivery consistently and with auditability. Transform your cloud infrastructure by identifying key components of your solution with monitoring, logging, and alerting. Secure your cloud assets by leveraging configuration management, security, and data encryption.