What a year! In 2023, we set a new record by delivering over 150 innovative features, making it the most productive year since I joined CloudHealth! From rightsizing to forecasting to policies, let’s dig into what we’ve shipped this year organized by the three phases of maturity as defined by the FinOps Foundation.
Inform
First, for the inform phase, CloudHealth released a modernized ML-based Forecasting engine. This has been a long time coming! We also invested heavily in FlexReports, including eight new datasets (ranging from Alibaba to Kubernetes), ten new templates (from identifying new savings opportunities to tracking savings achieved), and nine UX improvements (with a continued focus in the new year on UX). We shipped support for 31 assets using our new event driven collection, getting an asset’s data in the platform within 60 seconds of it being launched. Lastly, we shipped the next major improvement to our tagging management feature to allow you to control what tags are visible in the platform!
Optimize
One of the things we heard from our customers in 2022 was that they needed more features to optimize their costs. With that feedback in mind, last year we advanced both our rate and usage optimization feature sets. First up, we shipped rightsizing for the nine services listed below with all CloudHealth-calculated recommendations!
- S3 Rightsizing
- Azure SQL DB Rightsizing
- Redshift Rightsizing
- DynamoDB Rightsizing
- EBS Rightsizing
- ElastiCache Rightsizing
- OpenSearch
- Kubernetes Request Rightsizing
- Azure VM Rightsizing
But we didn’t stop at rightsizing. We also shipped these eight new policy actions to bring parity across AWS, Azure, and GCP for automated usage optimization:
- Create GCE Snapshots of a Disk
- Create Azure Snapshots of a Disk
- Start/Stop for RDS Instances
- Release Azure Public IPs
- Delete Azure Snapshots
- Delete Azure Disks
- Delete GCE Snapshots
And lastly, we invested in rate optimization and released our automated rate optimization feature “Savings Automator”. Included with CloudHealth, the feature will manage your RI fleet and maintain a specific level of coverage with a monthly budget you set. This is a great way to limit the number of tools you pay for! We also invested in our Azure recommendation engine and released recommendation support for fifteen different Azure services.
Operate
For the Operate phase of FinOps, we released a number of features to improve organizational adoption of CloudHealth and better integrate into a company's operational workflows. One of the ways we did that was with webhook support. CloudHealth data can now easily be put in the path of the engineer by integrating the policy engine with the applications engineers are logging into every day. We’ve seen integrations from Google Chat to Microsoft Teams to internal Cloud Management Platforms powered by CloudHealth data. What will our customers think of next!?
Remember those 31 assets? We also included tagging support for all of those to both help govern resources launched without tags that match your tagging schema and support taking action against resources matching specific tags.
Coming Soon
Lastly, it wouldn’t be an article from a Product Manager if it didn’t include some roadmap items. All of these features were in the hands of our customers in Private Beta to help drive improvements prior to launch. The first feature set, which has now been released to General Availability, is our GreenOps Operational Emissions Dashboard and FlexReport dataset. CloudHealth uses an in-house formula to calculate your Scope 3 energy consumption and carbon emissions for Compute for AWS and Azure to create high level reporting and empower engineers with actionable data. Our dataset includes this data at a resource level so engineers can track their emissions over time and the impact of launching applications on their overall emissions.
The other feature I am excited about is our newest RI recommendation engine which includes CloudHealth-calculated recommendations for OpenSearch, Redshift, ElastiCache, and DynamoDB. With this feature, we will have full support across AWS and Azure for all reservable services!
Last year’s achievements are only the beginning. Expect to see more investments in optimization, better enabling organizational alignment, and a brand new user experience! And yes, it does support Dark Mode. For more details on the new UX, check out our most recent blog article here!
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More Content by Lucas Paratore
