October 2021 Summaries

Vantage has introduced Slack support for cost report notifications, enabling users to receive updates on their cloud costs directly within their team's Slack channels. Previously, users could only access this information via the Vantage console, API, or email, but the new integration allows for more convenient access where team discussions are already happening. This feature is available to all Vantage users at no additional cost and can be easily set up by connecting a Slack account through the Report Notifications page. Users can customize which Slack channels receive the notifications and continue to receive updates via email if desired. The integration requires permissions to list, join, and post messages to Slack channels but does not read any messages. Future updates may include additional functionalities like Slack commands for requesting cost data.

Cloudflare's announcement of its S3 competitor, R2, has generated significant interest in the infrastructure community, with discussions centering on the potential benefits of migrating workloads from AWS to Cloudflare. A key concern for customers is understanding the opportunity cost and the likelihood of Cloudflare's long-term commitment to R2. Vantage has leveraged its dataset of AWS users to estimate a $1 billion annual revenue opportunity for Cloudflare, based on the analysis of 25,000 S3 buckets. The potential cost savings for customers migrating from S3 to R2 are significant, particularly in the Standard Storage, Intelligent Tiering - Frequent Access, and Reduced Redundancy tiers, which collectively represent 68% of S3 costs. However, a major consideration is the one-time egress fee charged by AWS, which could offset the savings. Vantage plans to offer tools to help users evaluate these savings and make informed decisions about transitioning to Cloudflare R2.

Vantage has introduced Filter Sets, a new feature that enhances cost reporting capabilities by allowing users to create complex queries to combine multiple segments of infrastructure costs across AWS accounts, tags, regions, and services into a single, cohesive Cost Report. Unlike previous versions which required all conditions to be met for a report, Filter Sets enable the use of OR clauses within a single report, making it possible to view costs even with inconsistent tagging across different accounts. This tool is designed to accommodate the reality that organizations may not always maintain perfect tagging discipline, thereby providing precise cost reporting despite inconsistencies. Filter Sets are freely available to all Vantage users across all tiers, including the free tier, and they allow for the visualization of active resources meeting the defined conditions, a feature not supported by AWS Cost Explorer. The data generated by Filter Sets can also be accessed through the Vantage API, maintaining the same level of accessibility as previous reports.

Vantage has introduced a new feature that allows customers using AWS Elastic Kubernetes Services (EKS) on Business and Custom tiers to view service-level costs for their Kubernetes deployments. This feature provides detailed cost insights by integrating data from AWS Cost and Usage Reports, Container Insights, and EKS Service APIs, enabling users to see day-by-day accrued costs for each EKS service, as well as the cost of un-utilized cluster space for better resource allocation decisions. Previously, the cost breakdown was limited to the EKS control plane and EC2 nodes, but now users can see more granular cost data, enhancing visibility into specific Kubernetes services. While this feature is not available for the Starter or Pro tiers, it does not incur additional charges for Business and Custom tier users, although there may be AWS-related costs for CloudWatch Logs and Metrics. The feature is currently exclusive to Amazon EKS customers, with potential plans to expand support to other Kubernetes environments and ECS services.