A platform that provides IT teams with a self-service portal through which they can both control access to and the cost of cloud resource consumption is now available in beta for free from env0.
Company CEO Ohad Maislish said that while many organizations have implemented self-service portals to control who can access resources on public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), it’s apparent more workloads will be heading into the cloud in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic to make organizations more resilient. As a result, there’s now a lot more sensitivity to cloud costs.
Rather than relying on estimations or manual tagging, Maislish said env0 allows IT teams automatically tag infrastructure in a way that ties cloud resources to a predetermined budget using an engine designed for that purpose. All too often, organizations wind up spending a lot more on public cloud resources than planned simply because there is no way to track spending in real-time, he noted.
In addition, it is common for organizations to find themselves being billed for “phantom workloads” that are created when developers forget to de-provision virtual machines, for example. The env0 platform provides automatic shutdown and time-to-live (TTL) options to eliminate that issue, said Maislish.
Env0 is fresh off raising $3.3 million in funding. The env0 platform, expected to be generally available in the fall, also makes available policy controls for managing passwords, keys and tokens along with role-based access controls.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a tendency for organizations to not pay a lot of attention to cloud costs. Achieving faster rates of building and deploying applications was considered a much higher priority. Most organizations will continue to put a premium on delivering applications faster. However, achieving that goal will be weighted more carefully against the total cost, especially as finance teams start issuing stricter cost mandates. In many organizations, the unfettered access to cloud resources that developers once enjoyed is likely to be more constrained.
Of course, env0 is not the only platform promising to help organizations rein in cloud costs. However, it has combined access and financial controls in a way many organizations have been unable to achieve. In fact, the biggest challenge when it comes to containing cloud costs may very well turn out to be the will to enforce controls on developers who previously had a wide amount of latitude.
It’s difficult to assess right now at what rate applications will be moving into the cloud. Many organizations may decide to lift and shift monolithic applications into the cloud as the first step toward making their IT environments more resilient. Others may accelerate the rate at which they are building and deploying new applications as once nascent digital business initiatives are transformed into business continuity strategies. Whatever the motivation, the days when many developers could spin up a virtual machine in a public cloud almost at will are most likely coming to an end.
