What strategies or tools do you employ to optimize cloud costs and control spending within your organization? How do you ensure the efficient use of cloud resources?
VP of IT - Digital Sales Platforms in Healthcare and Biotech, 10,001+ employees
We set up a FinOps community which basically uses the standard AWS and Azure reports to find out where our optimizations are and help judge whether we are still at a sufficient level. We send these reports out to the responsible service and account owners, who then follow up with the technical team to see if it’s possible to perform the optimization. They send feedback to the central FinOps team that then ensures the optimization is reported correctly – unless there's a reason why we can’t complete the optimization.President in Software, 51 - 200 employees
Proactive and reactive approaches are required to succeed. You must do both or you will fail. Proactive includes proper tooling, training and guardrails. It means regularly studying spend and making smart decisions around resource limits and options like reserved instances, savings plans, buying through a reseller at a discount, rearchitecting apps around PaaS and more. (Shortcut; Maximize the use of serverless, SaaS and PaaS. Minimize the use of IaaS.) Pick a competent cloud PS/MSP partner and use a cloud management platform (CPM) rather than relying solely on the hyperscaler.
Reactive means monitoring, alerting, incident response, anomaly detection, reporting, competent post-mortem after incidents including unexpected costs or failure of guard rails. It means never being blindsided by negative events as they cannot always be avoided and the assumption must be that they will occur in both known and new/novel ways over time. “Assumption of breach” is a good example of the correct mindset here.
Disclaimer: my company does exactly this work so I am naturally a bit biased towards working with a vendor vs “going it alone” or building your own tooling. YMMV and will depend on your size, scale and cloud center of excellence or equivalent subject matter expertise. The skills required to really do this right are typically found with AWS Pro Architect or equivalent top-end certified engineers with real-world experience around cloud ops and automation, PaaS etc.
Chief Information Officer in IT Services, Self-employed
FinOps / Technology Business Management function - make the costs visible. Educate and monitor.Content you might like
CTO in Software, 201 - 500 employees
Without a doubt - Technical Debt! It's a ball and chain that creates an ever increasing drag on any organization, stifles innovation, and prevents transformation.Yes80%
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Yes, significantly25%
Yes, but not by much59%
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Not sure3%
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