Ironside Group works with CloudScal3 to build FinOps Center on top of AWS 

 

 

CloudScal3 is a product company building solutions that will unlock cloud adoption by automating and integrating public cloud platforms to legacy applications and processes with the initial offering being FinOps Center.

 

 

CloudScal3’s FinOps Center was built to provide non-technical business stakeholders views and processes to manage their AWS spend. FinOps Center runs on 100% serverless AWS services so the decision to use QuickSight as the Business Intelligence tool was easy.

Considering the fact that CloudScal3's FinOps mission is to integrate and summarize data at a very granular level, working with an expert firm to design and implement was critical. CloudScal3 wanted to initially leverage and then update the CUDOS and Cloud Intelligence Dashboards (CID) as well as use their entitlement to control access. They needed some expert assistance and after an extensive search decided to work with Ironside.

FinOps Center is an application that provides cloud billing in the context of a customers Chart of Account. During the month, FinOps Center has processes to approve spending and budgets as well as provide visibility on spending to users based on their specific financial scope. Ultimately, FinOps Center integrates billing information into customers’ Accounts Payable and Financial Planning application. For users, they wanted to provide the resource level spending data that AWS has built in the CUDOS/CID dashboards.

The challenge that CloudScal3 had was minimizing the administration of row level security for users to have visibility into the AWS Account that were mapped in the FinOps Center to the financial scope of the user. As opposed to the User/Group pattern for row level security, Ironside designed a solution around the “Anonymous Embedding” pattern. The functionality of that pattern had the desired outcome where a user would only have access to the AWS Accounts that were mapped to the users financial scope.

Ironside’s Amazon QuickSight Lead, Ryan Bohne , shared, “As customers move to the multi-account framework of AWS and want to provide business users visibility into spending the onboarding of new accounts to users has administrated challenges. The anonymous embedding solutions for FinOps Center is nice because it leverages the work they have done to streamline the AWS Account to Financial Owner relationship and onboarding without any additional steps. ”

The CUDOS/CID dashboards are built to leverage the “Data Lake” that is deployed from the Cost and Usage Report data. FinOps Center creates additional spending related data that customers want to leverages for their BI use cases. Doug Vanderpool, CTO at CS3 shared, “The Ironside team was very helpful in bringing forward and building the anonymous embedding solution. Step 2 was how to take our spending context data and making available to the data queries/dashboards of the CUDOS/CID ” 

FinOps Center is a 100% AWS serverless application (Cognito, S3, Athena, Lambda/Step Functions, DynamoDB). The anonymous embedding component is a Typescript running on Node.js on Lambda with a REACT.js UI Component.

 

About Ironside

Founded in 1999, Ironside is an enterprise data & analytics solution provider and system integrator. From strategy to execution, we help organizations translate business goals and challenges to technology solutions that enable business insight, analysis, and data-driven decision making. Our core capabilities include Business Analytics Strategy, Business Analysis & KPI Modeling, Enterprise Planning, Data Science & Machine Learning, Data Integration & Governance, UX Design and Data Visualization.