Cost Visibility & Optimization

Firefly includes 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:

Resource Provisioning Cost Tracking

Firefly's Workflows can pull in cost data for provisioned resources. You can see how much each resource is costing, often on a monthly basis. For example, in the details of an EC2 instance, Firefly will 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. 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.

In Firefly's Governance page, you can see the list of "Cloud Waste" policies and their estimated cost impact. You can prioritize what to clean up for maximum savings.

Cloud Waste Remediation

Firefly's AI and rules engine provide recommendations to optimize costs. Firefly can suggest remediation steps for Cloud Waste policy violations. For example, if an EBS volume is found not attached to any instance, Firefly will suggest a command to delete it.

Enforcing Cost Rules using Guardrails

Using Firefly Guardrails, you can also set cost-related rules. For instance, you could have a rule 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 Guardrail rules, ensuring that cost controls are part of your deployment process.

Cost Reports

Firefly provides detailed cost reports, offering breakdowns by Cloud Waste policy. These reports can be exported or shared, proving invaluable for governance meetings, audits, budget tracking, and demonstrating cost optimization progress over time. Learn more about leveraging these insights on the Analytics Page.

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By acting on such insights (either manually or via Firefly’s automated workflows), you can trim your cloud bills significantly.