Over 20 years ago the Communications Management Association (CMA), which represented UK telecoms managers and others who bought voice and data services from telcos and ISPs, set out on a concerted campaign to get more detailed and correct billing from suppliers.
In many ways, says business technology journalist Antony Savvas, things just haven’t improved for companies acquiring their services from either telcos or cloud service providers since then, whichever country they are located in.
When the CMA, which eventually became part of the British Computer Society, started its campaign, the main focus was in getting bills that companies could actually understand, around the provision of landline calls, mobile calls, leased data lines and internet access services. The cloud as we know it now did not exist, and the first on-demand application and data services from application service providers (ASPs) had failed to gain traction.
Salesforce and Amazon
Salesforce and Amazon came along soon after of course, to deliver the first SaaS on-demand services and metered cloud service delivery, respectively. But companies reselling services like these and the end customers using them are still struggling to understand what they are costing them, until they are hit with rapidly rising and sometimes out-of-control bills.
Companies that have gone all-in with the major hyperscale cloud providers are now complaining that the services they have adopted as part of their “digital transformation” strategies are proving to be more costly than they imagined, and that the “elastic” operational flexibility promised by the providers isn’t proving to be achievable after all.
Kubernetes
Indeed, on the cost side, research from cloud service provider Civo, based on questioning 1,000 developers, says Kubernetes costs have risen for 47% of them, with a majority seeing a rise of up to 25% on year-on-year spend.
Kubernetes is being widely used by companies in the cloud, seeking to efficiently roll-out new applications and services and improve their DevOps. 57% of respondents had seen an increase in the amount of Kubernetes clusters running in their organisation over the last 12 months.
The number of developers who use one of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud as their main cloud provider has increased from 68% in 2021 to 72% in 2022. And all three of these have increased the prices of their services as more organisations use them, and in trying to recoup some of the large amounts of cash they have spent on networks and data centre infrastructure to deliver their services.
Civo says enterprise cloud spend has risen by 93% on average in the past year.
Last week, I attended the IT Press Tour across Silicon Valley to meet companies in the containers, Kubernetes, DevOps and niche cloud services market, and found some answers and some solutions that those worried about the effectiveness and cost of their telecoms and cloud services may well find helpful.
Sysdig
Sysdig has grown to be a key player in the market when it comes to offering streamlined management of customers’ data containers and Kubernetes clusters, both on-prem and in a multi-cloud environment.
Sysdig CEO Suresh Vasudevan says, “If customers just lift and shift their applications into the cloud without much planning they won’t get the right flexibility and performance they are looking for, and costs will be high too.
“Cost optimisation is key as our research shows that the capacity acquired in Kubernetes clusters is not being used, the clusters have been over-provisioned. This is partly down to a lack of expertise available to organisations, which is where we come in.”
The company recently unveiled its Cost Advisor tool that helps customers choose the right cloud services at the right cost, by looking at their capacity and operational requirements and tailoring the acquired services accordingly.
CloudFabrix
This firm bills itself as the provider of a “data-centric AIOps platform”, delivered through microservices, and which can also be accessed through Amazon Web Services.
It has reported 250% year-on-year growth, and its technology partners include IBM, Cisco, system integrator DXC and HPE. HPE offers the technology via its GreenLake on-demand cloud data services.
CloudFabrix says it has major partnerships signed and there are a number of joint customer deals “in progress”, but it obviously wants more for its “robotic data automation fabric (RDAF)”.
It’s low code offering allows organisations to get new applications and services up and running quicker using bots, on-demand analytics and pipeline management.
Solo.io
Solo.io provides an open source “service mesh” to manage APIs and help firms adapt to major business and market changes. It also helps them to control their cloud costs as they go down a multi-cloud route.
It markets its products through the GlooPlatform. There are more than one service mesh solutions on the market, and Solio.io uses and helps develop the Istio platform, which was originally released by Google five years ago.
In fact, Solo.io has developed its own version of Istio in the form of “ambient mesh”, which it says is more streamlined and easier to use than Istio. It offers networking, communications and security support for customers’ data, and fills the operating gaps found in Kubernetes, which is mainly used to deploy resources, rather than manage policies, for instance.
Customers using the software include T-Mobile, Skyscanner, Santander, BMW Group and SAP, so it must be doing something right.
Amberflo
Amberflo is a startup squarely in the billing and metering space, and says it was recently approached by a “major international telco” to help it meter and bill customer use around 5G network slicing in the hospital sector.
This company has some pedigree, seeing its CEO is a former general manager of AWS, and its CTO is a former lead engineer at AWS. Both were able to marvel at the way Amazon is able to collect the customer data usage of its own products via the cloud and accurately bill accordingly, says CEO Puneet Gupta.
Amberflo’s software can be used by both service providers and their end-customers to make sure bills are easier to understand and accurate.
When it come to metering and billing, Gupta says, “Don’t point the finger at AWS or any other provider, look to solve the problem yourself, get the right tooling and own your own metering.
“Before you get the bill from your provider work out your metering first and who uses what. It’s too late when you get the bill, it will tell you nothing.”
As the old adage goes, if you want something done properly, do it yourself!
The author is Antony Savvas, a global freelance business technology journalist.
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