Cloud Inventories
In the last posts we’ve established how important it is for automated auditing purposes to collect data about all cloud resources in your accounts. Especially because cloud providers have a portfolio of services that is too large to track without tooling support.
Cost reduction through centralized cloud inventories
Another advantage beyond the automated audit is that this inventory can then be used to run queries against it for specific report generation in your company. For example to find all resources running in regions you wouldn’t want to be used. Or finding functions using outdated language runtimes.
Because this inventory is centralized it removes the hassle of having to go through individual accounts and looking after resources in each region. This is a hassle that is especially problematic when trying to find many smaller cost factors as individually spending the time to track each one might be too much work, but finding them centrally helps keeping costs low.
Use case
At a customer we were able to reduce costs by 15% with no impact on service simply because we had a list of NAT Gateways, Snapshots and other resources we could use to talk to individually responsible teams and remove or consolidate resources. Going through all accounts individually and identifying these resources through costs alone would not have been feasible. Another use case was tracking Lambda functions and their runtime versions to make sure they are regularly updated before end of life on any supported runtime is reached.
Conclusion
Combined with the automated auditing capabilities cloud providers support the inventory that you can generate enables many use cases to have more visibility in all your deployed resources across many accounts and regions. All automated, all the time.
If you want to get some support to provide these insights and visibility in your own cloud infrastructure please reach out, we’re happy to help with your cloud journey.
