As an IT manager or as a Team Lead, what is the first word that comes to your mind when you think of “AWS cloud governance?” Is it the word “control?” Are you enforcing rules, continuously monitoring, micromanaging, and auditing policies & processes to control cloud usage using STATIC REPORTS?! Do you think that is the right way to govern AWS, considering cloud is such a dynamic environment? No. The right word is ‘visibility,’ because bringing too much control into your IT creates process bottlenecks, increases time-to-market, brings inflexibility, and ultimately leads to blind spots due to team’s disinterest or miscommunication. On the other hand, creating visibility and using visual cloud monitoring gives you superpower to overcome above challenges. Giving your IT team the visibility of all its resources in place no matter where they are in the cloud is pivotal. It means you can predict, be aware, let your team know what’s happening in the infrastructure, and empower others to take timely action without fatigue. Imagine this: During a regular audit, Alex, the Team Lead of a big IT infrastructure team, observed a recurring spike in the current AWS bill cycle. After slicing and dicing the AWS cost by projects and resources, he found that it was from DevOps engineer Bob’s account. To Alex’ knowledge, Bob was using few EC2 instances two months ago for one of the experimental projects. Over a chat, Bob assures Alex that he had discarded these experimental resources upon project’s closure. But Alex is in denial. To convince Alex, Bob comes forward and shows his account’s EC2 console to assure him that he had indeed discarded all the experimental resources. After much debugging and root-cause analysis, hopping from one console to another console manually, they find out that there were unused ELBs and unattached EBS linked to those experimental instances. These orphaned resources were the culprit. Since Alex’s job is to bring all the problematic resources to the forefront and ensure the bill amount does not exceed the allocated budget limit, he is coerced to set up an organizational process for Bob as well as his other team members to avoid such scenarios in the future. Even though Alex knows that this process might hinder team flexibility and productivity. This, folks, is a clear case of lack of cloud visibility. If we told you that Bob and Alex could address their problems and needs, in under five minutes, using a single cloud visibility platform, would you believe us? Here’s how: Using a cross-functional visual cloud monitoring console, for holistic AWS governance. With one visual interface, both Bob and Alex have a complete visibility of spend and usage across resources. Bottom line: One Visual Interface, Complete Cloud Visibility If you observe the above GIF, both Bob (the DevOps) and Alex (the DevOps Lead) were able to address their problems and needs using a single platform in under five minutes! Want to know more about TotalCloud’s Contextual Monitoring and Cost Analyzer, read our top blogs: Immersive Visualization for Contextual Cloud Monitoring: Breaking the Barriers of Silos A Game Plan to Unlock Maximum AWS Cost Savings with TotalCloud Visual Cost Analyzer Originally published at blog.totalcloud.io on February 27, 2018.
