In addition to AWS Compute and Data & Analytics Services, ProsperOps Intelligent Showback now supports Microsoft Azure compute services, such as Virtual Machines, App Service, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and more. It works alongside Autonomous Discount Management (ADM) for Azure to equitably reallocate commitment costs and savings across your subscriptions.
Challenges with a centralized approach
In Microsoft Azure, organizations can either manage reservations centrally using “Shared” scope, or decentrally using resource group, subscription, or management group scopes. A centralized commitment management approach yields the highest overall savings outcomes for the organization. When commitments float across all subscriptions within a billing scope, they can be applied to more resources. This generally leads to higher utilization, and thus greater savings.
While centrally managing Reservations and Savings Plans for Compute is a best practice, Azure’s native tooling doesn’t make it easy to equitably allocate commitment costs and savings across subscriptions. There are two main challenges that arise (similar to AWS):
- Cost is incurred where a commitment is purchased, not where it is consumed. The subscription associated with a commitment purchase bears all of the cost, while subscriptions that utilize those commitments do not.
- Allocation of savings benefit is non-deterministic. When Azure Reservation scope is set to “Shared”, commitments float across subscriptions within the billing scope and are randomly applied to eligible usage. This mechanism disproportionately rewards certain subscriptions in a billing scope.
Close the books quickly and accurately with Intelligent Showback
To solve these challenges, ProsperOps Intelligent Showback reallocates your commitment savings to eligible compute resources based on a shared benefit model. It also distributes your costs, and optionally ProsperOps’ fees, according to the same model, to illustrate equitable all-in financial outcomes of each subscription.
For each subscription in a billing scope, Intelligent Showback breaks down original costs (displayed on your Azure invoice) by service and commitment type, and can be further categorized by resource type and region combination. Reallocated savings and net adjustments are also displayed for each subscription.
In 2022, we launched Intelligent Showback for AWS Compute because we realized that generating incremental savings via commitment management (ADM) wasn’t enough; organizations also needed a way to fairly allocate those savings. Without automation, FinOps and accounting teams can spend hours each month or quarter trying to untangle commitment costs and manually adjust savings to close the books. Intelligent Showback removes the manual effort and back-and-forth among finance, FinOps, and engineering; it calculates the net adjustments required at a granular level each month. Using this system, ProsperOps users can equitably distribute commitment costs and savings with no effort required.
To learn more and get a demo, sign up HERE.
Prosper On! 🖖
Joe Benincasa
