Softline Coster

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2023: Opportunity to see each business unit spend on cloud infrastructure

The Cloudmaster team (Softline Group of Companies) has improved Coster, a solution to increase the cost-effectiveness of using cloud resources. Now customers can see the spending of each of the business units on the cloud infrastructure. Softline announced this on March 1, 2023.

As a rule, the client company of the cloud service receives a common bill for services and does not have a clear idea of ​ ​ who specifically and in what volumes uses them. In this case, it is quite difficult to figure out exactly what kind of project consumes how many resources, which significantly complicates the adoption of management decisions and leads to additional costs.

Cloudmaster conducted its own study of the needs of cloud users and identified the need to implement the business slice function. Now customers can create filter groups that sequentially sum up records billing by categories in which the user looks at their costs. It is possible to create groups based on the names of structural units (subscriptions, accounts, resource groups, vApp, etc.), by tags (,) and Azure AWS by service type (for example, disk, VM and others).

The implementation of this functionality allows companies to understand who spends and how much in the context of products, projects, business units financial and responsibility centers. This helps to avoid unscheduled spending and see the need to adjust spending day in, day out, rather than deal with unexpected increases in the cloud bill when it arrives at the end of the month.

Thus, the allocation of expenses on business cuts implies the emergence of a group of unaccounted spending. If the client did not expect to see anything in it, but the costs still appear, then perhaps he spent the money in vain, and Coster will identify such a problem.

Coster is based on FinOps practice, which involves cloud infrastructure financial management based on. data Implementing the practice allows organizations to get the most out of the business. This is relevant for active users of cloud services with an extensive and complex internal structure (many teams and many projects), - said Vitaly Secretenko, head of development at Cloudmaster.

2022

Inclusion of interchangeable software for the banking sector in the catalog

On August 22, 2022, the company Softline announced that Coster's multi-cloud solution was included in the Interchangeable Directory ON for the Banking Sector. Financial institutions have the opportunity to choose the most suitable the Russian solution for themselves with the required functionality, including the Softline product - Coster, designed to manage cloudy infrastructure costs. With the help of Coster fintech companies, as well as organizations from the bank sector, they will be able to organize continuous management of cloud costs from a single window, which will contribute to the efficient use of cloud resources and increase their transparency.

The catalog was prepared with the active participation of ARPP "Domestic Software" and together with a number of associations - both participants in the financial market and associations of IT sector companies - in order to develop effective intersectoral interaction. To compile the catalog, the FinTech association has identified a list of foreign software that credit institutions use in their practice, while Russian IT companies have indicated their own solutions with similar functionality. Thus, a list of interchangeable software for the banking sector was compiled.

In this catalog, the Coster solution is indicated as interchangeable software for four foreign solutions - Amazon AWS Cost Explorer, Hystax OptScale, Microsoft Azure Advisor, Microsoft Azure Cloud Cost Management

We are pleased that our Coster product is now included in the Banking Interchangeable Software Catalog. When developing the solution, we focused on the needs of fintech companies - in Russia financial , companies are large consumers, and it virtual IT infrastructures was important for us to take into account their needs. For these organizations, Coster will become a convenient tool for predictive analysis the cloud resources and expenses used. In addition, in the single window mode in Coster, you can solve such current tasks as forecasting costs budgeting and for future periods. The multi-cloud solution will also allow financial companies to conduct allocation of expenses resources across business units. Conveniently, you no longer need to access external tools in order to view the plan/forecast for each department - the product details by information consumption up to each employee. All this will allow organizations to improve manageability and efficiency of use. As cloud-services a result, top managers of the company will be able to effectively manage costs, monitor them daily, as well as quickly make changes to the budget and prevent overspending, told Stanislav Bykov, Development Director of the CloudMaster project at Softline.

Expanding the functionality of a multi-cloud solution

On June 10, 2022, Softline announced that it had expanded the capabilities of its own Coster solution, designed to manage cloud infrastructure costs. The innovations are already available to users of the service and relate to more complete details of reports on the costs of a multi-cloud. Also, thanks to the updated functionality, the Coster service determines an ineffective model for using cloud resources and, based on this, gives individual recommendations on how to optimize costs on a case-by-case basis. In addition, Coster users will be able to share information about the current state of the cloud with colleagues. Thus, the service will become not only more convenient to use, but will also allow you to even more effectively manage the IT infrastructure.

Source: softlinearmenia.am

Coster was developed by Softline to increase transparency of multi-cloud costs and cost-effectiveness of cloud resource utilization. With this service, companies that consume [[[[Virtualization|Virtualization 'virtual]] resources and services from several cloud providers at once solve the problem of unmanaged costs, delayed deployment of infrastructures and chaotic growth of cloud subscriptions. Coster belongs to the CloudMaster product line and is registered in the Unified Register of Russian Software.

"Since entering the market, our solution has been improving. So, after adding a number of options, Coster supports almost all known virtualization systems and hypervisors. The development of functionality is designed to improve the user experience, make the visualization of important aspects even more understandable and detailed. However, the additional capabilities of the solution contribute to even more efficient management of the IT infrastructure, which is the main task of Coster, " told Stanislav Bykov, CloudMaster Project Development Director at Softline

Based on the information displayed in Coster, IT managers can make informed and cost-effective decisions. The service includes a dashboard, which conveniently reflects all plans and facts on expenses, forecasts, as well as recommendations for improving efficiency. Thanks to the updated features, in the "Reports" section you can get even more detailed data: make a cut from familiar subscriptions, accounts and resource groups. This section presents:

• Schedule with 7, 30, and 90-day cost dynamics
• table with data by clouds, accounts, subscriptions, resource groups;
• Filters to be saved
• the ability to upload and send a report through instant messengers.

Another feature in the service will allow you to track "lost" resources. The optimization tools provided in the cloud platforms of providers are complemented by their own Coster mechanism, which helps to detect, for example, unattached disks. The "Resources" module on the dashboard will show which virtual machines can be saved on, and "Allocation" - inefficient machines and disks for each expense item. In addition, in the expense item for Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS), it became possible to reduce costs by stopping virtual machines with one click.

Also, Coster has added the ability to share information about the state of the cloud with colleagues - any page of the solution is equipped with a "Download and Share" button, and you can send data in various ways email (//) by social networks messengers choosing a convenient format (/). Excel PDF

Further work is planned to improve the functionality of the solution, as well as the development of products in the CloudMaster line.

OpenStack Infrastructure Support Plan

Softline On April 22, 2022, it announced plans to support cloudy infrastructures at the base OpenStack as part of the Coster multi-cloud platform. Users of OpenStack solutions will have the opportunity to aggregate everything information about the costs of cloud infrastructure as soon as possible.

Many Russian corporations create their cloud platforms based on the free OpenStack software, which is used to form a private and public cloud infrastructure. In this regard, Softline's Coster team decided to support OpenStack on its platform. A basic connector has been created that can be adjusted to fit each individual cloud.

The business will be able to manage its cloud infrastructure: consolidate costs, track them and control the spending of each of the company's divisions. This will reduce costs and optimize resource management. This will be especially true for companies that use other cloud solutions together with OpenStack.

We are constantly developing our platform, adding more and more opportunities for customers. OpenStack-based clouds are very common in Russia, and we see the unconditional relevance of adding these solutions to Coster. One of the advantages for Russian users will be that Coster is a product registered in the Unified Register of Domestic Software, "said Stanislav Bykov, Development Director of the CloudMaster project at Softline.

Ability to manage costs in the MS Azure cloud

Coster's Multi-Cloud IT Cost Control service has added the ability to manage costs in the MS Azure cloud. Softline announced this on March 30, 2022. Now the function of separating budgets and IT expenses by projects has become available to customers using Azure. This will help users more efficiently distribute spending on cloud services and cut extra costs.

This tool allows you to systematically and quickly streamline IT infrastructure costs with minimal labor. The feature will be relevant for customers who use Azure and want to reduce the cost of renting cloud services.

{{quote 'Conducted by CusDev (Customer Experience Studies) has shown that the responsible for expenses needs to regularly reconcile costs with the budget, find deviations and eliminate them. Building order in a multi-cloud infrastructure is a system job that requires significant labor, which most customers do manually.

Coster is able to reduce the volume of routine operations by up to 5 times. This is a decision center, which is a dashboard, where all plans and facts on expenses, forecasts, as well as recommendations for improving efficiency are presented in a convenient form. Coster allows you to manage several clouds at once, including Azure, - said the director of development of the CloudMaster project at Softline Stanislav Bykov.}}

When connecting the Azure cloud service to Coster:

• data from Azure is loaded into Coster;
• Automatically create budgets for all cloud subscriptions
• budget amounts are established based on the analysis of the average monthly spending of previous months.

The user can only reconcile and adjust the amounts. This allows you to correlate the consumed volumes with specific owners within the company - different departments. Thus, the customer receives control and forecast of expenses for all resource users.

Support for vSphere solutions

Softline's multi-cloud Coster solution now supports vSphere solutions. Softline announced this on March 25, 2022.

Now customers using the vSphere platform can also cover their infrastructure with Coster and save from 10% on cloud services.

The multi-cloud Coster service belongs to the CloudMaster product line and was launched by Softline in early February 2022. This solution helps the business to manage, IT infrastructure built on the basis of several. clouds In addition, it is one of the first cloud resource management products registered in. Unified Register of Domestic Software With the Coster platform, customers can consolidate and track cloud product costs, which greatly simplifies resource management for organizations using various services. providers

{{quote "Softline customers often face the problem of managing multiple services. For example, situations are known when the customer has several vSphere systems of different generations. To manage this extensive structure, you need, say, eight different interfaces, which makes it much more difficult to monitor resource costs. In turn, we propose to combine all this data on one convenient and intuitive platform so that top managers of the company can effectively manage costs, see them daily, quickly make changes to the budget and avoid overspending. This will help save not only funds, but also the main resource - time, - said Stanislav Bykov, director of development of the CloudMaster project at Softline. }}

On March 11, Softline launched additional services to help implement projects with Russian software and equipment, including the use of virtualization tools and other cloud solutions. Softline customers can get advice on working with CloudMaster products by contacting through the feedback form on the site.

Launch Softline Coster

On February 8, 2022, Softline announced the release of its next Coster service, designed to increase the transparency of multi-cloud costs and the economic efficiency of using cloud resources. With the help of this service, companies that consume virtual resources and services of several cloud providers at once will be able to solve the problem of unmanaged costs, delayed deployment of infrastructures and chaotic growth of cloud subscriptions. Using Coster is expected to reduce cloud infrastructure costs by at least 10%. In addition, this solution belongs to the CloudMaster product line, which means it is also included in the Unified Register of Domestic Software.

In the context pandemics of not only a sharp increase in the number of working from home IT teams and employees, but also increased the pace of implementation of cloud infrastructures. But due to the hasty transfer of applications clouds in consumers of such services, strategic mistakes were made. Therefore, companies are now focused on resolving supply chain issues and optimizing cloud infrastructure costs. According to the report, IDC already in 2021, 76% of IT managers called optimization of cloud infrastructure costs one of the main priorities and, based on the conclusions of IDC analysts, this trend will continue at least until 2025. Therefore, when developing the Coster solution, the provider's team was primarily focused on creating an effective tool for consolidation and analysis from data various systems virtualizations of numerous service providers.

"The Coster service will be in demand primarily by fintech companies, retailers, industrial enterprises, as well as IT companies. The share of consumption of public clouds by these organizations in the Russian market is about 60%. We expect Coster to become an automatic and irreplaceable advisor and enabler for our customers in forecasting costs and better estimating budgets. Users will be able to clearly (tables, graphs) determine cloud costs and where they differ from budget cycles. So, if there is a risk of exceeding budgets (for example, if the consumption rate is exceeded), the service will immediately notify the user. Based on this information, the specialist will be able to make an informed and business-appropriate decision on cloud consumption, identify what resources and what type of consumption leads to overspending. Thus, the decision will allow not only to quickly respond to the financial situation, but also to plan in advance, distribute budgets, preventing their excess, as well as optimize capacity. With the help of Coster, companies will increase the manageability and efficiency of using cloud services, because it will be possible to detail information on consumption up to each employee, "- explains Stanislav Bykov, CloudMaster Project Development Director at Softline.

Coster from Softline allows you to:

• Collect cost data
• Match cost centers, resources, and budgets
• notify about the balance of budgets;
• turn off the machines if the budget is exceeded.

It is also worth noting that the basic functionality of Coster provides:

• Achieve accurate budgets without re-approvals, unexpected excess, or "inventory"
• complete automation of the entire approval chain;
• Securing those responsible for resources and costs
• Providing hints and recommendations on the structure of budgets
• Automatically stop and delete resources.

Companies consuming cloud resources in Microsoft Azure, VMware Cloud Director and vSphere, AWS, Google Cloud, Nutanix, Yandex.Cloud, VK Cloud Solutions, OpenStack and Hyper-V can evaluate the service on demo data, analyze the compliance of the solution functionality with their own tasks.