AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Automating Cloud Cost Optimization with nOps nSwitch and Amazon EventBridge
By James Wilson, Vice President – nOps
By Shakthi Dakuri, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
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The flexibility and availability of new service offerings in Amazon Web Services (AWS) has empowered engineering teams to exponentially increase the velocity of innovation. Teams can experiment with new technologies, provision resources at scale, and architect scalable solutions with fully managed services in days instead of quarters.
Optimizing environments for cost, however, is often an activity that happens only in response to unexpected growth of charges in the bill. Today’s teams are talking more about cloud economics and FinOps while struggling with time, resources, and tools to effectively identify, prioritize, and optimize their environment.
nOps nSwitch makes this process easy, allowing both engineering and finance teams to explore, identify, and automate optimization opportunities.
Central to the solution’s capabilities is its certified integration with Amazon EventBridge. This allows users to deploy, configure, and operate continuous cloud cost optimization into their AWS accounts with peace of mind that their mission-critical resource optimizations will be handled in a secure and scalable manner.
In this post, we will discuss how nOps’ integration with Amazon EventBridge helps customers to pause, reconfigure, and right-size a broad variety of popular AWS services so they can tune for the most optimal cost while maintaining reliability and security.
nOps is an AWS Select Tier Services Partner and AWS Marketplace Seller with the Cloud Operations Software Competency. nOps is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud management platform that helps customers monitor, analyze, and manage changes, cost, performance, security, and compliance of their AWS environments.
What is Amazon EventBridge?
Amazon EventBridge serverless message hub is designed to connect components together, and make it easier to build scalable event-driven applications.
One of the primary use cases allows secure, easy, and reproducible integration between SaaS applications (like nOps) and AWS customer accounts. AWS has a rigorous certification process where it ensures the security, consistency, and architecture of SaaS applications to become a partner event source. As a partner event source, you can integrate with services like nOps with just one click.
Amazon EventBridge is highly scalable to ensure time-sensitive optimization commands are delivered and are cost-effective; it costs pennies to process millions of messages.
nOps nSwitch and Amazon EventBridge
nOps nSwitch is an automated ML-based platform that helps add elasticity to your AWS workloads. Requiring read-only permissions, nOps continuously ingests and correlates a multitude of data sources from your AWS environment, and then processes it to identify optimization opportunities based on resource utilization patterns and machine learning-based workload detection.
nOps groups these opportunities into recommendations, which allow you to easily quantify the impact in terms of cost savings. This makes it easy for both engineering teams and finance teams to prioritize taking action.
nOps simplifies the process of exploring data points like resource utilization, load diversity, cost, event history, and resource relationships. This helps engineers understand the basis of nOps recommendations and act on them with confidence.
Figure 1 – nOps identifies idle resources based on utilization and usage patterns.
The intuitive user interface (UI) allows teams to tune and adjust the optimizations and schedule remediations with just one click.
Figure 2 – nSwitch configuration interface makes scheduling idle resources easy.
It’s easy to configure the nOps nSwitch EventBridge integration. You can create and manage your EventBridge from within the nOps application and configure it with one click using an integrated AWS CloudFormation script.
Figure 3 – nOps data platform and integration with customer environments.
How it Works
- nOps provides a convenient way to create an Amazon EventBridge in your AWS account that can be deployed to any region.
- You launch a CloudFormation script that will automatically:
- Create an AWS Lambda function in your account, which is capable of performing several optimization tasks, such as:
- Pausing
- Hibernating
- Scaling
- Right-sizing
- Tagging resources
- Depending on the modules you enable in nSwitch, the Lambda function is granted specific AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions to carry out the relevant actions on your resources. Note that permissions are entirely managed by you and remain within your account, ensuring you maintain complete control over your resources and secure credentials.
- The EventBridge is configured to subscribe to nOps’ certified event source in AWS and to send signals to the Lambda function whenever a relevant event occurs.
- Create an AWS Lambda function in your account, which is capable of performing several optimization tasks, such as:
- nOps processes the data and generates actionable recommendations.
- You choose which recommendations to act on, and then schedule for one-time or recurring optimization.
- nOps scheduling engine ensures the Lambda function receives the appropriate signals via EventBridge, either instantly or at a scheduled time.
Customer Benefits
One of the challenges facing organizations building in the cloud today is realizing the power of AWS consumption-based pricing models to truly become elastic.
nOps is a fully-automated FinOps platform that gives users the ability to build a true FinOps practice within their organization. This helps you to inform, optimize, and continuously operate in an environment of unit economics.
nOps nSwitch can help automate the optimization in your environment for use cases like:
- Pausing sophisticated lab environments during inactivity, thus saving up to 70% on dev, quality assurance, and staging lab expenses.
- Identifying batch workloads that require heavily-provisioned machines, and ensuring they are only active when you need them.
- Dynamically scaling your Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) node groups and Auto Scaling Groups.
- Continuously right-sizing Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) resources based on your actual usage.
- Automatically upgrading to more cost-effective options like Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) gp3 volumes.
- Cleaning up orphaned resources.
Conclusion
The nSwitch integration with Amazon EventBridge is designed to make AWS optimization simple for customers. One of the most significant benefits of using the nSwitch integration is that it makes it easy for engineers to take action on nOps recommendations.
nSwitch also helps engineering teams take advantage of the elasticity of AWS. By incorporating scheduling recommendations intelligently and automatically adapting to workload changes, you can achieve better cost efficiency and peak performance.
With nOps, your team can focus on innovation while nOps automates your cost savings on autopilot. Learn more about nOps in AWS Marketplace and book a demo call today.
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nOps – AWS Partner Spotlight
nOps is an AWS Cloud Operations Competency Partner and SaaS cloud management platform that helps customers monitor, analyze, and manage changes, cost, performance, security, and compliance of their AWS environments.