Feedback on using Netflix Ice by a select group of current Teevity users
We’ve put between the hands of a select group of our customers, a version of Netflix Ice running against their AWS account billing. The idea was to get functional feedback from “real users”.
Context of the test
These users had already been using Teevity cloud costs analytics for several month and we have a direct connection with them.
They did not auto-discover the product, we pushed it at them and gave access to it pre-configured for their AWS accounts, as a SaaS solution but isolated from our existing Teevity SaaS service. So they had in their hands a “very easy to get access to” version of Ice, with functional support provided by us.
This first test didn’t cover all aspects of Ice (AWS Reservations for instance where not covered by the test).
Feedback 1 - Ice is very good for AWS cost debugging
One thing which comes back from all the participants is that Ice is very good at “debugging” your cloud costs. The graphical view it provides enable a deep dive inside the cost and usage data that AWS dumps inside your Programmatic Billing bucket.
Feedback 2 - Ice comes with a powerful “factor throughput” concept built-in
Another point that some participants liked very much is that Ice has a “Factor throughput” feature that they would have liked to use. It’s not useable out of the box from the existing code base but it aims at:
showing business metrics along side your cost timeline
factorizing these cloud costs y the business metric to show your ‘cloud cost per unit of [business metric]
Feedback 3 - Frustration for missing features, lack of data from Programmatic Billing or Cost Allocation Reports tagging
The Ice code published on GitHub is quite incomplete (probably because before being published, the code had to be cleaned up from Netflix specifics) and so Ice, as it is on Github today, lacks several features that at least some companies need regarding cloud costs management
easy cost sharing between people in the company,
historical analysis going before Programmatic Billing which is not retroactive,
cost classification beyond AWS tagging which are not retroactive either,
access protection,
and an API (if you want to integrate your costs in Excel for instance)
AWS Programmatic Billing and Cost Allocation Report are not retroactive
The other thing that caused frustration is not related to Ice but to the way AWS Programmatic Billing and Cost Allocation Report work: they are not retro-active.
You cannot go further in your cost exploration than the initial date of activation of Programmatic Billing (which is why you should activate Programmatic Billing now !)
When Tags are used inside the Cost Allocation Report, they only apply from the time you apply them. You need to quickly get them right, because until you stabilize them for a full month, your cost reports will be hard to read.
Feedback 4 - Some customers don’t love SaaS that much
One of these customers, a Europe-based US army supplier who has strong confidentiality requirements, was very interested in this test because Ice “could run all inside [his] AWS account” (since it was started on his account with a CloudFormation) but was “as easy as SaaS”.
AWS Marketplace vs SaaS
That’s an interesting feedback! And I guess what is true for cost analytics will be true for many other solutions: the "AWS Marketplace" option will probably be a serious challenger to the "SaaS option" in the years to come, especially as the AWS Marketplace matures (and is able to launch full CloudFormations instead of just single EC2 instances).
Conclusion
When used as a Cloud cost debugging tool, the feedback on Ice has been very good.
Ice was thus seen as very complementary to Teevity’s existing feature set and a very good addition for deep “AWS cloud costs analysis”.
This is why, as announced in our previous post, Ice features will make their way into Teevity cloud costs analytics and will complement the existing features which make it easy to share cost data inside the company and to fetch historical cost and usage data.
NetflixOSS Ice as-a-Service by Teevity, coming in two flavors
We are pleased to announce that we will soon start offering two flavors of Netflix Ice in an "as a service" way:
As an integrated part of our Teevity cloud costs analytics services for both the free and the premium SaaS Teevity offerings.
As a standalone service, through the AWS Marketplace. As simple as a SaaS solution, but without the cost-privacy concerns (since it runs on your own AWS account without any connection to us).
It's the easiest way to run Ice and to get an always up-to-date version. If you are interested: http://ice.teevity.com/register/.
The code behind these two services is based off Teevity's fork of the Ice project, which can be found on Github.
What is NetflixOSS Ice ?
Last June, NetflixOSS released "Ice", their cloud spend and usage analytics on GitHub which they've been using internally for a while.
It's a tool that's mainly targetting DevOps and Dev folks, with a focus on:
Getting a detailed understanding of how much is spent, and on which services, on your AWS account(s), all through charts and filters
Giving feedback to teams on how much they have, or their project have, spent over a giving period of time
The way Netflix has been using this tool was presented at AWS re:Invent 2012 back in November by Watson Coburn and his colleagues. But the exact feature set of the version of Ice was unknown at that time.
How does Ice fit in the Cloud cost analytics landscape ?
Ice is somewhat different from the existing cloud cost monitoring solutions in that:
It's focusing on a purely graphical analysis of cost and usage data
It doesn't provide any cost optimizations recommendations
it's purely based off the output of AWS billing engine and is not doing any cost simulation based on usage analysis.
And it goes further than the existing players in one interesting area:
it offers the basis of what is needed to compute a "cost per unit of business" through a notion called "throughput"
It also has many extension points that Netflix is probably taking advantage off on its internal version and which can be used to extend the product.
After a careful analysis of the product, we think it has the potential to become a standard in detailed cloud costs analytics targeted at technical teams. So we have decided to invest and build on it.
Very complementary to Teevity existing service
Ice is very complementary to Teevity's existing service, which is mainly targeted at managers.
It makes a very natural extension to our existing feature set. And our goal has always been to target both the technical and the financial world and to create a cost related communication channel between them.
So expect to see more and more integration of Ice features inside the Teevity cloud cost analytics service in the months to come.
The easiest way to run Ice
Since 2012 when we've started building Teevity, we've heard customers who were concerned about privacy issue related to their cloud spending. And they were not keen on using a SaaS service to track and optimize their cloud costs.
In response to that, we have decided to start offering a "run in on your own AWS account" version of Ice that is a easy to use as a SaaS version.
If you want to start using Ice today (for just a few hours or in an always-on mode), without having to go through many technical steps, the easiest way to run it is here : http://ice.teevity.com/register/
How-to : Use Teevity for Amazon cloud costs monitoring with a read-only IAM user
As we explained a few days ago, Amazon has just announced a new feature of their Amazon Identity and Access management system (aka Amazon IAM).
You can now create IAM users with restricted rights that only have access to the Account Activity and Usage Report pages of the AWS portal, the one that give you information about your current costs.
These pages are the ones parsed by some AWS cloud costs monitoring solutions (the ones that do comprehensive and precise AWS cost reporting vs estimations), along-side other sources of information.
Here is the 3 steps configuration process. It's only 2 minutes !
Step 1 - Enable access to the Billing page
Step 2 - Create an IAM group dedicated to Cloud cost monitoring
Step 3 - Create a new IAM user and add it to the group
You now have a "user/password" you can safely share with a third party AWS Cloud costs monitoring tool like Teevity Cloud costs analytics.
And you're also pretty close to seeing these kind of charts on your Teevity dashboard.
And you can also use our graphical Widget on your desktop.
