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:

Improvement Plan

Manually aggregate and correlate consumption with costs

  • Use AWS or third-party tools to create a summary infrastructure costs
  • Calculate an approximation of cost per tenant
  • Use automation to correlate tenant consumption with AWS costs

  • Automate the ingestion of AWS costs
  • Introduce automation that can ingest and summarize data from AWS billing reports
  • For environments that have access to third-party billing providers, use the ingestion automation of these providers to ingest AWS billing data. Use the APIs of these providers to acquire the billing data.
  • Ingest cost data into your cost per tenant analytics repository
  • Store the cost data with your tenant consumption data using one of the AWS repositories that align well with the analytics cost and experience that you are targeting, such as Amazon Redshift, Amazon S3, or Amazon OpenSearch.
  • For scenarios where a third party is aggregating costs, use APIs to ingest the cost data from these solutions into your cost analytics repository.
  • Use automation to summarize tenant consumption and calculate the cost per tenant
  • Correlate tenant consumption percentages with ingested AWS cost data to generate a cost per tenant for each tenant in the system.
  • Expose the cost per tenant data through APIs that allow this data to be surfaced as part of operational views.
  • Integrate cost per tenant metrics into your Cloud Financial Management model
  • Use cost per tenant data to determine hot multi-tenant consumption trends are influencing the business and financial success of the organization.
    Calculating SaaS Cost Per Tenant: A PoC Implementation in an AWS Kubernetes Environment