Apptio Cloudability & Turbonomic — The Perfect Couple !!!

I have penned this article as a reflection of my own thoughts and without being influenced by any organization or individual .

This blog highlights how two IBM products viz. Apptio Cloudability and Turbonomic, are revolutionizing the FinOps environment. According to me individually, they excel in their domains, but together, they offer a comprehensive platform for businesses to optimize and automate IT decisions. This is just the start of many integrations to come. I think we can call them Apptio Cloudability & Turbonomic — The Perfect Couple .

To explore more read on ….

Before anything else let’s refresh our knowledge on FinOps , TBM , FOCUS and Unit Economics . As I unfold my thoughts through this article you will find a mention of these topics throughout the article .

What is FinOps ?

FinOps, short for Financial Operations, is a collaborative framework that integrates financial management, procurement strategies, product ownership, and engineering efforts within organizations to effectively manage and optimize cloud costs throughout the entire lifecycle of cloud services.

• From a finance perspective, FinOps involves tracking and analyzing cloud expenditures, ensuring budget adherence, and identifying cost-saving opportunities to align spending with overall financial objectives.
• Procurement teams in FinOps focus on strategic sourcing, negotiating cloud contracts, and managing vendor relationships to optimize costs through favorable terms and discounts offered by cloud providers.
• For product owners, FinOps centers around prioritizing cloud investments that align with product development goals and customer needs, ensuring cost-efficient solutions without compromising on performance or scalability.
• In the realm of engineering, FinOps emphasizes optimizing cloud infrastructure, managing resources efficiently, and implementing automation to enhance operational efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
• By integrating these perspectives, FinOps aims to foster financial accountability, drive business value through optimized cloud spending, and support organizational growth and innovation in the digital age.

What is TBM ?

TBM stands for Technology Business Management. It is a discipline and framework that helps organizations manage and optimize their technology investments and resources effectively. TBM provides a structured approach to understanding and controlling IT costs ( not only Cloud Costs ) , as well as aligning IT spending with business priorities and outcomes.

Key aspects of TBM include:

• Cost Transparency: Providing visibility into IT costs and expenses across the organization, enabling informed decision-making and cost accountability.
• Financial Management: Applying financial principles and practices to manage IT investments, budgeting, and forecasting.
• Service Planning and Optimization: Optimizing IT services and resources to maximize value delivery and efficiency.
• Benchmarking and Performance Management: Comparing IT costs and performance against industry standards and internal benchmarks to drive continuous improvement.
• Business Alignment: Ensuring that IT investments and initiatives support business objectives and contribute to overall organizational success.

TBM frameworks and tools enable IT leaders and stakeholders to make data-driven decisions, improve resource allocation, and demonstrate the business value of IT investments to key stakeholders within the organization.

What is FOCUS ?

To excel in FinOps, data is paramount. From minimizing costs and negotiating rates to understanding usage trends and tagging strategies, every aspect hinges on cloud billing data. Managing the influx of diverse billing data from multiple vendors daily poses a significant challenge. Simplifying the ingestion, normalization, and analysis of this data is crucial for effective reporting and actionable insights.

Enter FOCUS, the FinOps Open Cost & Usage Specification. It’s not just a technical standard; it’s a toolkit designed to establish a universal framework for cloud cost, usage, and billing data. By promoting consistency across Cloud, SaaS, and internal billing sources, FOCUS enhances cost visibility and facilitates informed decision-making, ensuring everyone speaks the same language when it comes to managing cloud expenditures.

What is unit economics ?

In the realm of FinOps, unit economics refers to the application of financial principles and metrics to assess the cost and profitability of cloud resources or services at a granular level. It involves understanding the financial impact of each unit of cloud resource usage or service consumption, and how it contributes to the overall financial health and efficiency of an organization’s cloud operations.

Key aspects of unit economics in FinOps include:

• Cost per Unit: Analyzing the cost associated with each unit of cloud resource usage, such as compute hours, storage, data transfer, etc.
• Revenue or Value per Unit: Evaluating the value derived from each unit of cloud service or resource, which may include business outcomes or benefits generated by using the cloud.
• Profitability per Unit: Calculating the profit or return on investment (ROI) achieved from each unit of cloud expenditure after accounting for costs.
• Optimization Opportunities: Identifying opportunities to optimize costs and maximize value from cloud investments, such as rightsizing instances, leveraging discounts, or improving resource utilization efficiency.

Now that we are versed with the basics to explore the rest of the blog , let’s see how among various studies and surveys related to cloud native and multi-cloud the most glaring of the market facts that stand out demanding attention :

• While 70% of new apps will be cloud-native by 2024 , 65% of organizations will use Kubernetes in production .
• Also around 81% of organizations will adopt multi-cloud by 2024 and 87% say digital services will disrupt their industry .

The above figures unanimously make us comprehend how Business is moving and to what extent are Organizations undergoing digital transformation driven by a rapidly changing market . However the road ahead is not bereft of challenges in the world of FinOps .

To me there are 3 or 4 different and prominent challenges that can be summed as follows :

• We tend to undergo the “Paradox of Choices” with Cloud Object Provisioning . In order to make something optimally performant we tend to over provision cloud objects and as a result it has been observed that 30% of all that we provision over Cloud gets wasted .
• There are cloud objects that you can tag easily ( eg. VMs , Storage , Network etc.) and there are cloud objects that you cannot tag easily or none at all ( if a Kubernetes Cluster is used by multiple teams then tagging the individual components of the namespaces is not a straightforward process ) .
• Detecting cloud waste, anomalies, and idle resources has never been very straightforward process .
• Issuing Charge Back and/or Show backs against business units have not been very transparent , in other words it would be wrong to think that it is an easy job to make business units financially accountable for the cloud consumption that they make .
• Multi-cloud discount programs are pricing strategies and incentives offered by cloud service providers to encourage organizations to commit to using their services across multiple cloud environments. There are always challenges in comparing multi-cloud discount programs .

What is Apptio?

Apptio is a robust cloud-based platform delivering actionable financial and operational insights.Founded in 2008, Apptio quickly emerged as a market leader, consistently recognized in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for the past two years. As the leading technology spend and value management company, Apptio helps organizations translate technology investments, spending, and costs into business outcomes. It is also a founding member of both TBM and FinOps.

Now Apptio is a bouquet of three different products , although my interest lies solely with Apptio Cloudability , here is the full listing :

Apptio Product Offerings:

• ApptioOne : Technology Financial Management took for hybrid/multi-cloud cost transparency and planning (IT Spend) .
• Apptio Cloudability: FinOps tool for multi-cloud and container cost management and optimization (Cloud Spend) .
• Apptio Targetprocess: Enterprise Agile Planning tool for data-driven investment prioritization (Resource Allocation / Labor Spend).

What is the core speciality of Apptio Cloudability ?

Think of Cloud FinOps through Apptio , think of Apptio Cloudability . Cloudability is pivotal for organizations worldwide in implementing FinOps practices across the complete lifecycle: inform, optimize, and operate. Apptio accurately allocates all cloud costs to responsible business groups, offering features like Business Mapping to apply company rules for cost assignment. It also extends capabilities into Kubernetes environments to ensure fair allocation of containerized costs, supporting automated show-back or charge-back processes effectively.

Main Use Cases of Apptio Cloudability :

• As an Enterprise if you have adopted Multi-Cloud then Apptio is the apt solution for Multi Cloud cost optimization .
• As it is projected that 65% of organizations will use Kubernetes in production in the next couple of years , Container spend management will gain unprecedented attention .
• As Business observes crests and troughs in demand it is important to adopt the right strategy for rightsizing recommendations of cloud objects .
• As Cloud enables different teams to collaborate , allocating costs to different teams with a charge back and/or show back and enabling team ownership for their cloud consumption will be required to bring the much required transparency in cloud billing .

What is Turbonomic?

Turbonomic is a cloud and hybrid cloud management platform that specializes in workload automation and optimization. It uses AI-powered analytics to continuously assess the performance, resource utilization, and operational needs of applications and workloads across various IT environments, including on-premises data centers, public clouds, and hybrid setups.

Key features and capabilities of Turbonomic include:

• Application Resource Management : Automatically adjusts resources (such as CPU, memory, and storage) to match application demand in real-time, ensuring optimal performance and efficiency.
• Resource Optimization: Analyzes workload patterns and resource usage to optimize infrastructure resources, maximize utilization, and minimize costs.
• Application Performance Assurance: Ensures that applications consistently meet performance and service level objectives (SLOs) by dynamically adjusting resources based on real-time demand and workload characteristics.
• Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Management: Provides visibility and control across multiple cloud platforms (such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) and on-premises environments, enabling unified management and optimization of resources.

Cloudability with Turbonomics

In simple terms, with Apptio Cloudability and Turbonomic combined, we cover the entire FinOps lifecycle:

• Apptio (Fin): Handles financial aspects such as prioritizing investments, predicting spend, and allocating costs.
• Turbonomic (Ops): Manages operational aspects including workload automation, maintaining service levels, and optimizing across the application lifecycle.

Together, these products optimize cloud usage by detecting anomalies, reducing waste, and maximizing discounts. They provide a unified platform for insights and actions, ensuring data-driven decision-making and efficient execution of recommendations.

Turbonomic integration in Apptio that has already happened is poised to revolutionize the FinOps world by leaps and bounds .

Apptio Cloudability & Turbonomic — The Perfect Couple .

*** Please share your comments including your thoughts where you might have liked or even disagreed with my thoughts . Collaboration will bring out the true essence of any posts . Thanks for reading through :-)