There are two key products in our platform designed to work together. Autonomous Discount Management (ADM) algorithmically and programmatically manages commitment-based discounts (e.g. Reserved Instances and Savings Plans) to maximize savings outcomes for various services across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. By design, savings are maximized at the billing entity level (e.g. for AWS, that is an Organization).
Once savings are maximized, there is a second task of optimally allocating that pool of savings to the proper individual resources that received the benefit. This is critically important to determine accurate costs per account, application, instance family, environment type, etc. This is where ProsperOps Intelligent Showback comes in. ADM and Intelligent Showback work in unison for our customers to both maximize and properly allocate savings.
We’re excited to announce that Intelligent Showback now supports ADM for RDS, ElastiCache, OpenSearch, MemoryDB, and Redshift! In addition to AWS Compute, customers can now intelligently allocate their costs and savings for these additional AWS commit-discountable services.
The Showback Dilemma
Traditional showback is the process a company uses to split a single, centralized cloud bill among the individual teams, products, resources, etc. that created usage. For AWS users, showback is particularly challenging since adhering to FinOps best practices and purchasing discount instruments from a centralized account means the AWS native billing setup will treat this account as a catch-all for the entire discount portfolio’s costs. While other teams across the organization see the savings benefits, the FinOps team bears the costs of the commitments themselves. In addition, AWS billing natively applies discounts in a seemingly random manner. That is, teams that run identical resources across the organization may end up with an uneven or haphazard allocation of savings from the central portfolio of commitments. All of this makes accurate showback hard.
Intelligent Showback: A Smarter Way to Allocate Cloud Cost and Savings
We’ve taken our Intelligent Showback approach, which already helps teams fairly split costs and savings for AWS Compute, and extended it to RDS, ElastiCache, OpenSearch, MemoryDB, and Redshift.
ProsperOps customers using ADM for these additional services will automatically see the expanded showback data set in our console. Individual AWS service data is labeled and filtering is available for customized analysis. Expanded Intelligent Showback data is available in the CSV download and customers using our recently launched Data Export feature will now see the expanded Intelligent Showback data set. Intelligent Showback data for both our console and Data Export is immediately available starting January 2025. In the coming weeks, historical Intelligent Showback data will be backfilled to help with any previous showback reconciliations.
This release supports our Shared Benefit method, which spreads net savings fairly across all resources, relative to their discount rate and amount of usage, regardless of whether they have matching RIs or not. It’s a straightforward way to ensure no one misses out on the savings provided by ProsperOps.
Check out our help center for more information on Intelligent Showback, or schedule a demo for a closer look.
We hope this new launch helps you prosper even more in your FinOps practice.
Prosper On! 🖖
Clay
