Keep cloud costs under control. FinOps can help

FinOps, or Financial Operations, is a relatively new management practice that deals with the financial side of a public cloud environment. Using a variety of tools, it provides valuable information about how much each service and application costs the company. This creates shared responsibility for the cloud computing infrastructure and optimizes costs.

The bigger the company, the harder it is to manage costs, and this is more true for the cloud than for anything else. This is why not only developers, but also finance and business teams need to be involved. Sometimes a FinOps expert doesn’t even need to be a programmer – analytical thinking and an understanding of finance are more important. There are several tools on the market to manage costs through FinOps. Each public cloud provider offers its own, but third-party tools are also available, supporting multiple cloud providers simultaneously.

Reliable and environmentally friendly solution

Thanks to FinOps services, you can solve situations where you need to calculate how much the cloud costs, and then optimize its price or integrate it into the company structure. The main goal is to maximize the return on investment for all services or applications deployed within the cloud. You can save money, be more strategic and define the optimal way to manage the product project  financing within the company. With greater transparency, data about cloud costs and usage will be far more accessible, leading to better decision making.

Have you ever asked a developer how much it will cost to run their code, or how many times a function in their code will be called? For serverless development, this is important. Developers working for clients often come from different backgrounds, and they are not always cloud native. FinOps not only optimizes the existing system, but also helps to evaluate which provider to use for a particular type of application, or when it is worth rebuilding an application to take advantage of cheaper computing power off the expensive peak.

Stepan Raichl, AWS Consultant at Trask.

It is basically the same as taking out a mortgage. “When choosing, many people have no idea where to go and why a particular offer is or is not worthwhile in their situation. And when it’s unclear, they seek the help of a financial advisor. Similarly, an online comparison site can help when choosing an electricity supplier,” Raichl offers a comparison.

Immediate savings independent of developers

What will properly implemented FinOps bring you?

1. Transparent spending (in addition to a clear insight into costs, you will see what’s worth changing and optimizing, and what’s not)
2. Clearer planning (for example, find out where the most money is being spent and how to change it)
3. Responsibility for costs on the part of specific teams
4. Recommendations for short-term and long-term cost savings
5. Experience for future projects
6. Reduced emissions (more efficient use of the cloud saves energy and is sustainable)

Working with FinOps experts, Raichel says, will first and foremost bring order and peace of mind, whether you are a bank, automotive enterprise or any other company. The immediate, developer-independent savings are, of course, another great advantage. But this is complemented by a strategic overview of where else you can save. And with greater agility, you can better adapt to current trends and demands.

Trask and Cloud Competency

We started intensively developing our cloud competency in 2012 in cooperation with Škoda Auto and VW Group. Given the need to address service cost optimization over big multimedia data and to scale systems for large peaks of user load from the start, we have been working components now established in FinOps framework (such as sub-script optimization, individual services, monitoring, tagging and distribution of financial costs, etc.).

We pinpointed areas of excessive cloud usage (where redundant VPN connections had been the prime issue) and collaborated with architects to engineer more cost-efficient solutions. Utilizing PowerBI and AWS QuickSight, we also automated report generation, which significantly aids in budget control and optimization. Once the multi-cloud reporting infrastructure was established, we amassed enough data to offer further advice and implement the FinOps methodology more effectively.

Stepan Raichl works at Trask as an AWS consultant. As a certified AWS Professional Solution Architect, he has experience in designing cloud solutions, estimating their operational costs and optimization (both economic and performance).

Author

Stepan Raichl
AWS Professional Solution Architect
sraichl@thetrask.com