COST 2: How are you correlating tenant consumption with the costs of your infrastructure?
Correlate tenant consumption data with infrastructure costs to calculate the cost per tenant. The goal is to provide your business and technology teams with an ongoing view of how tenant load and architecture choices are influencing the overall cost profile of your SaaS application.
Resources
AWS re:Invent 2017: GPS: SaaS Metrics: The Ultimate View of Tenant Consumption
Calculating Tenant Costs in SaaS Environments
Best Practices:
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Manually aggregate and correlate consumption with costs: Tools are used to manually collect and aggregate cost data for a period. The data is summarized for services and correlated with a tenant consumption data to calculate a cost-per-tenant.
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Use automation to correlate tenant consumption with AWS costs: An automated mechanism acquires cost data from AWS or third-party tools, and correlates this data with tenant consumption allocations to determine the cost per tenant.
Improvement Plan
Manually aggregate and correlate consumption with costs
- Aggregate the cost data with a granularity that will best align with the level detail you’ll want to expose in your cost-per-tenant report.
- For direct, programmatic access to cost data, consider introducing automation that will access AWS Cost and Usage Report data.
- For a solution that uses manual AWS tooling, consider exporting cost data from the AWS Cost Explorer.
- For third-party options, consider using an AWS partner cost analytics solution that
ingests and summarizes cost data.
- Configure AWS partner cost analytics tools to create a summary of cost that best aligns with your needs.
- Export the costs data from your cost analytics tool in a format that can be imported into your manual cost correlation environment.
- Combine your tenant consumption metrics with the cost data in a single tool (Excel, for example) that can provide a summary view of cost per tenant.
- Generate a report that provides a summary view of cost per tenant for all the tenants
in your system.
- Consider having a total percentage of consumption for each tenant that can be applied to a total cost to arrive at a high-level view of cost per tenant.
- Where it adds value, consider support more granular views of cost-per-tenant than can apply a tenant’s percentage of consumption to individual elements of your AWS bill.
- Manually generate these reports each period to provide an ongoing view of cost per
tenant trends
Calculating Tenant Costs in SaaS Environments
Use automation to correlate tenant consumption with AWS costs
Calculating SaaS Cost Per Tenant: A PoC Implementation in an AWS Kubernetes Environment