Dana CazacuOptimize cloud costs with Atmosphere’s advanced insights, real-time usage data, and detailed reports to reduce waste, plan growth, and boost accountability.
Managing cloud costs effectively has become one of the biggest challenges for businesses embracing cloud infrastructure. 84% of organizations say that managing cloud spend is their top cloud-related challenge. Without clear visibility into how resources are being utilized, organizations often face spiralling expenses caused by overprovisioning, underutilization, or inefficient resource allocation. For businesses running complex workloads, this lack of insight can quickly drain budgets and hinder strategic growth.
Atmosphere, built on OpenStack, transforms the way businesses manage cloud costs. With its advanced usage reporting and real-time insights through Stratometrics, an open-source project we have developed ourselves, Atmosphere enables businesses to gain a comprehensive view of their resource consumption. Whether it's virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, load balancers, or storage, Atmosphere provides the transparency needed to optimize spending and align cloud usage with business goals.
In this blog post, we’ll explore how Atmosphere enhances OpenStack’s usage reporting capabilities, the challenges it solves, and actionable strategies for leveraging these insights to reduce costs and improve efficiency.
§ Tackling Cloud Cost Challenges
Cloud environments offer unparalleled flexibility and scalability, but they also come with significant cost management challenges. Without the right tools and insights, businesses often find themselves grappling with escalating expenses and inefficiencies. Atmosphere, built on OpenStack, addresses these pain points by providing detailed usage reporting and actionable insights, but first, let’s look at the challenges organizations face.
Unpredictable Costs
One of the most common challenges in cloud environments is unpredictable costs. The flexibility to quickly provision resources, while beneficial, often causes expenses to climb unexpectedly. This is especially true when teams lack visibility into resource consumption. For example, to avoid performance bottlenecks, teams may unknowingly overprovision virtual machines, storage, or networking resources. While this approach ensures smooth operations, it also results in significant waste and inflated costs. Atmosphere’s real-time usage reporting eliminates this uncertainty by providing businesses with a clear view of their resource utilization, enabling smarter decisions and cost predictability.
Overprovisioning and Underutilization
Another major challenge is the tendency to over allocate resources or leave them idle. In many cases, businesses provision resources based on peak demand scenarios, leaving those resources underutilized during normal operations. This leads to wasted spending that could otherwise be allocated toward innovation or strategic growth.
Atmosphere’s advanced usage insights help identify underutilized or idle resources, empowering businesses to right-size their infrastructure. By optimizing resource allocation, organizations can reduce waste and ensure that every dollar spent delivers value.
Limited Transparency in Billing
For many businesses, tracing cloud costs back to specific projects, teams, or workloads is a daunting task. Without detailed reporting, IT leaders struggle to understand where resources are being consumed and why. This lack of transparency creates inefficiencies in budget allocation and makes it nearly impossible to hold teams accountable for their usage.
Atmosphere addresses this challenge by providing detailed, millisecond-accurate usage reports across all cloud components, from VMs and Kubernetes clusters to storage and load balancers. These insights not only simplify cost tracking but also enable businesses to implement chargeback models, ensuring that every team is accountable for its resource consumption.
By solving these common cost challenges, Atmosphere empowers businesses to take control of their cloud expenses. With the right tools and insights, organizations can reduce waste, improve efficiency, and allocate resources more strategically—all while staying within budget.
§ How OpenStack Usage Reporting Solves These Challenges
Efficient cost management in cloud environments requires a detailed and technical understanding of resource consumption. OpenStack’s usage reporting capabilities provide the tools necessary to tackle these challenges by offering granular insights, real-time data, and highly customizable analytics. When combined with Atmosphere’s advanced platform enhancements, these features empower organizations to achieve unparalleled control over their cloud infrastructure and spending.
Granular Resource Tracking
OpenStack’s architecture enables precise monitoring across its core services—Compute (Nova), Block Storage (Cinder), Networking (Neutron), and beyond. The system collects and organizes resource usage data from these services, allowing for a detailed breakdown of CPU hours, disk IOPS, memory allocation, and network throughput. This granularity ensures that organizations can pinpoint specific workloads or resources that are driving costs.
Atmosphere amplifies this capability by expanding tracking to include Kubernetes clusters, storage interactions via CSI, and load balancer activity. For instance, an administrator can analyze which VMs are consuming excessive CPU cycles or identify underutilized Kubernetes pods. This level of granularity is crucial for identifying hotspots in resource consumption and optimizing configurations to reduce costs without compromising performance.
Customizable Reporting for Specific Needs
OpenStack’s modular design allows usage reporting to be tailored to specific operational needs. By querying its telemetry services, such as Stratometrics, administrators can generate reports that focus on resource consumption at the tenant, project, or even individual user level. This flexibility is invaluable for businesses with complex multi-tenant environments or teams requiring granular accountability.
Atmosphere enhances this flexibility by providing an intuitive interface for generating and accessing these reports. For example, cloud administrators in Hosted and On-Premise editions can view detailed usage analytics across all projects, while individual users can access reports relevant to their own workloads. Atmosphere’s built-in reporting tools eliminate the need for manual data aggregation, enabling faster decision-making and operational efficiency.
Real-Time Insights
In dynamic cloud environments, the ability to monitor resource usage in real-time is critical. OpenStack’s telemetry services, integrated with its message queue architecture (e.g., RabbitMQ), enable the collection and processing of near real-time data. This allows businesses to detect sudden spikes in resource usage, predict budget overruns, and make immediate adjustments.
Atmosphere extends this capability by embedding real-time reporting directly into its platform. Administrators and users can access dashboards that display live data on resource consumption, such as VM uptime, storage utilization, and network traffic. For example, a DevOps team deploying a new Kubernetes cluster can track its resource impact in real time and adjust scaling policies on the fly. This level of responsiveness ensures businesses remain agile and cost-efficient.
How We Achieve Accuracy Down to the Millisecond
Achieving millisecond-level precision in OpenStack’s usage reporting is made possible through its event-driven architecture. Every resource action, whether it’s launching a VM, attaching a volume, or modifying a network is immediately logged with precise timestamps. These events are systematically captured and aggregated, ensuring the delivery of highly accurate usage metrics. This level of precision is critical for enabling transparent billing and effective chargeback processes.
If you want to learn more about this topic, we highly encourage you to read this blog post Monitoring an Openstack Cloud: Tools, Metrics and Alert Fatigue.
§ Strategies for Cost Optimization Using Atmosphere’s Usage Insights
Right-Sizing Resources
Atmosphere’s usage reports make it easy to spot oversized VMs or Kubernetes clusters and adjust them to match real demand. Scaling down an overprovisioned instance, for example, frees up capacity without affecting performance.
Identifying Idle or Underused Resources
Dormant VMs, forgotten storage volumes, or other underutilized resources can quietly drain budgets. Atmosphere highlights these inefficiencies so they can be shut down or repurposed, cutting unnecessary costs.
Optimizing Workload Placement
By analyzing workload patterns, Atmosphere helps teams place workloads where they run most efficiently. This ensures performance is maintained while keeping costs in check.
Implementing Chargeback Models
Detailed, millisecond-level usage data allows organizations to assign costs to specific teams or projects. This not only improves accountability but also encourages smarter, more cost-conscious use of resources.
Planning for Growth
Historical usage data gives businesses a clear view of trends over time. With this information, teams can forecast needs more accurately, align budgets with growth plans, and scale infrastructure with confidence.
Atmosphere gives organizations the visibility they need to cut waste, improve efficiency, and make sure every resource delivers value.
§ The Atmosphere Advantage in Cost Transparency
Improved Budgeting and Forecasting
With detailed usage data and historical trends, Atmosphere gives businesses the clarity they need to budget with confidence. Whether it’s compute, storage, or networking, teams can see exactly how resources are being used and plan accordingly. This makes budgets more realistic, prevents surprise overruns, and keeps IT spending aligned with overall business goals.
Increased Accountability Across Teams
When costs can be tied directly to projects, departments, or even individual users, accountability becomes part of the culture. Atmosphere makes this possible with transparent reporting, helping teams understand their cloud footprint. The result is smarter decisions, less waste, and easier implementation of internal chargebacks.
Conclusion
Atmosphere brings transparency to every layer of cloud cost management. From eliminating waste and right-sizing resources to improving forecasting and encouraging accountability, it ensures businesses get the most from their cloud investment. With this level of insight, organizations can grow strategically while keeping day-to-day spending under control.
If you’d like to bring Atmosphere into your organization with the help of our team of experts, reach out to our sales team today!