Cost Visibility & Optimization

Firefly | Manage Your Cloud with Infrastructure-as-Code includes powerful cost management features that bring transparency to cloud spending and help eliminate waste. In many organizations, cloud costs can spiral due to forgotten resources or over-provisioning. Firefly's approach to cost optimization is to first make costs visible at the resource level, and then to highlight and remediate inefficiencies.

Key features for cost visibility and optimization:

Per-Resource Cost Tracking

Firefly's inventory isn't just a list of resources; it also pulls in cost data for those resources. You can see how much each resource (or group of resources) is costing, often on a monthly basis (Own Your Cloud: How to Discover and Inventory Your Entire Cloud Footprint with Firefly | Firefly). For example, in the details of an EC2 instance, Firefly might show an estimated monthly cost. This helps you identify expensive resources quickly and correlate cost with configuration (e.g., high cost might indicate an over-sized instance).

Cloud Waste Identification

Firefly automatically flags unused or underutilized resources that contribute to cloud waste (Own Your Cloud: How to Discover and Inventory Your Entire Cloud Footprint with Firefly | Firefly). Common examples include:

• Unattached volumes (e.g., EBS volumes not attached to any instance, accruing cost with no usage)

• Idle compute instances (VMs running at very low CPU utilization or stopped but still incurring some cost)

• Orphaned IP addresses (allocated IPs not in use)

• Old snapshots or backups beyond retention needs, etc.

Firefly's analytics can surface these in a "Cloud Waste" report or section (Own Your Cloud: How to Discover and Inventory Your Entire Cloud Footprint with Firefly | Firefly). Each item will show its estimated cost impact, so you can prioritize what to clean up for maximum savings.

Cost Anomaly Detection

Because Firefly continuously monitors your environment, it can also detect when costs spike unexpectedly. If a particular service's cost jumps significantly week-over-week, Firefly can alert you to investigate. This early warning can catch things like a resource that was mistakenly left running or a sudden scale-up that wasn't anticipated.

Optimization Recommendations

Firefly's AI and rules engine provide recommendations to optimize costs. This might include suggestions like: rightsizing an instance (e.g., "Instance X is running < 10% utilization; consider resizing to a smaller instance type to save money"), deleting orphaned resources ("Volume Y is unattached and costing $50/month; consider removing it") (Remediation | Firefly), or even using more cost-effective managed services. These recommendations are context-aware – Firefly knows your environment, so it can tailor advice (it won't suggest deleting something that's critical, for example, but it might highlight it for review).

Enforcing Cost Policies

Tying into Policy-as-Code, you can also set cost-related policies. For instance, you could have a policy that alerts if any development environment exceeds a certain budget, or if someone launches an unusually expensive instance type. Firefly can then act on these policies, ensuring that cost controls are part of your governance model.

Cost Reports & Visibility for Teams

Firefly can break down cloud spend by team, project, or environment (based on tags or resource groupings). This way, you can attribute costs and identify which teams or applications are driving cloud expenses. These reports make it easier to have accountability and to find opportunities for optimization in each area.

Using Firefly's cost optimization features, one customer discovered dozens of unattached volumes and idle resources, resulting in immediate monthly savings (Remediation | Firefly). As an example, Firefly might output data (via its API or UI) about waste like this: