Driving Financial Accountability at the Intersection of Finance, Business, and Technology with Kyndryl FinOps

By Kathryn Lin, Associate Director, Global Offering Management – Kyndryl
By John Sanchez, Director, Cost and Asset Management Architecture – Kyndryl
By Mohan Sundaram, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect – AWS

Kyndryl

Managing cloud costs and investments can be complex. It’s easy to overspend on cloud services with no enterprise-wide visibility or predictability of utilization, making it hard to ensure cloud investments are bringing the speed and innovation expected.

Without a unified way for organizations to assess cloud investments, they can become an unmanageable and costly tangle. A new way of working is needed. FinOps is a culture and set of governance processes, supported by the right technology, that drives financial accountability to the edge, creating a cost-conscious culture to maximize return on IT investments.

Kyndryl‘s approach to cloud cost management is collaborative. Developed organically in working with clients and fueled by the team’s extensive experience in managing clients’ complex hybrid IT environments, Kyndryl puts emphasis on the importance of transparent visibility in creating awareness and cultural transformation.

Kyndryl does not ignore the systemic changes needed to operationalize FinOps for the long term. however. An end-to-end FinOps service provider, Kyndryl leverages its people, process, and technology to help clients achieve their desired FinOps maturity and business outcomes.

Kyndryl is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and Managed Service Partner (MSP) that’s a global IT infrastructure services provider that’s relentlessly innovating to help customers with cloud-native transformation and make the journey seamless.

Kyndryl’s Approach to FinOps on AWS

Kyndryl’s comprehensive range of services are accelerated by leveraging FinOps, a Kyndryl Bridge application that provides a complete data-driven view of costs and utilization of AWS services and hybrid IT environments.

This application enables FinOps practitioners to visualize and analyze costs, get insights on savings trends, and generates recommendations of usage optimizations, such as right-sizing compute and leveraging AWS Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plan for capacity planning.

Kyndryl’s approach to FinOps on AWS includes:

• Advise: Kyndryl helps you identify the current state of your FinOps maturity and where you need to be. Its approach begins with a diagnostic assessment and helps establish stakeholder alignment by developing a case for change and designing a roadmap to the desired state.
• Implement: In an iterative model, Kyndryl helps deploy the workloads leveraging AWS services and adopt FinOps processes suited for your enterprise. It encourages best practices like building support early in the program with a pilot that proves the business case and provides insights into the sustainability of the target operating model.
• Operate and optimize: Once the FinOps model is defined and adopted, Kyndryl continues to monitor and optimize the solution, ensuring your organization is always getting maximum value. As a managed service provider, Kyndryl offers various levels of support focused on adoption and continuous improvement.

FinOps Solution: Shared Cloud Architecture

The diagram below presents the FinOps architecture deployed on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). 

Figure 1 – FinOps solution architecture diagram.

Data Flow

1. A scheduled ingestion job automatically begins triggering the enrichment server.
2. Enrichment server publishes messages to Cloud AMPQ (RabbitMQ) to the extractors.
3. Extractors receive the messages.
4. Extractors make API calls to retrieve cost and asset data from the different cloud accounts.
5. Cost and asset data are normalized to a schema format and stored into MongoDB Atlas.
6. Extractors publish completion messages to the enrichment server.
7. Enrichment server running on Amazon EKS clusters perform pipeline processing to generate the value added FinOps data. It builds tag databases, groups costs data, and performs cost allocations and price rules.
8. Enrichment pipelines are invoked in MongoDB.
9. After completion, the insights reads the enriched data, run machine learning (ML) models in the EKS pods, and generates recommendations for actions on resource utilization, savings plans, and RIs to optimize cost.

User Flow

10. User logs into Kyndryl Bridge to view the cost, assets, and insights dashboards.
11. Requests come through the ingress into the FinOps user interface (UI) server.
12. UI server serves web pages.
13. Users are authenticated and authorized using the Modern Ops IAM service.
14. API server retrieves the cost and manager data for the dashboards.
15. Insights server retrieves the recommendations and provides optimizations for the insights dashboards.

Key Features on AWS

Kyndryl’s FinOps solution is designed to help your business manage the spend and usage for AWS and other clouds:

• AWS Reserved Instances and Savings Plans: FinOps displays On-Demand, Reserved Instance, and Savings Plan coverage so the organization can achieve the desired level of commitment-based discount coverage. Kyndryl’s proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) and ML models analyze past consumption to recommend changes in RI or Savings Plan purchase and coverage.
• Cost attribution using AWS provider tags: Attribution is the cornerstone of pushing cost visibility to the edge of the organization. Using Kyndryl’s proprietary AI/ML, FinOps discovers existing provider tags to suggests how to define tag policies. Once tag policies are defined, tag compliance identifies the assets that deviate from the established tag schema.
• Insights dashboard – AWS Recommendations: Leveraging AWS Cost Explorer API, FinOps can ingest provider recommendations to help customer optimize their AWS services.
• Insights dashboard – Kyndryl Recommendations: Applying Kyndryl’s proprietary AI/ML to usage patterns, FinOps suggests cost optimization activities different from AWS-generated recommendations to maximize efficient utilization of AWS services.
• Anomaly detection: Users define anomaly policies to detect and alert on spending patterns in the middle of a period which will impact final invoices. Anomaly policies enable an organization to proactively react to cost impacting events before they materially impact an invoice.
•  Role-based access management: Customers can set up specific roles for FinOps personas with defined tasks and permissions to view, configure, download, create policies, and other admin functions.
• Single pane of glass: Customers can reduce the lead time to consolidate, distribute, and verify departmental hybrid multicloud costs across on-premises, AWS, and other cloud provider resources.

Kyndryl FinOps in Action

Kyndryl has deep expertise in designing, running, and managing modern, efficient, and reliable technology infrastructure. It’s building on a foundation of excellence by creating systems in new ways, bringing in the right partners, investing in the business, and working side by side with customers to unlock potential.

Figure 2 – Kyndryl FinOps persona mapping and operating model.

• Cost optimization and savings: Customers can expect to see up to 30% savings by consolidating visibility and optimization of costs across multiple providers through Kyndryl’s cost optimization recommendations.
• IP-led FinOps solutions: Kyndryl is deeply committed to partner and co-create with customers leveraging its FinOps Certified Platform approved by the FinOps Foundation to build and integrate best-of-breed FinOps capabilities.
• FinOps service provider: Kyndryl is a FinOps Certified Service Provider recognized by the FinOps Foundation, with 230+ FinOps Certified practitioners that have knowledge and practical experience in public and private cloud and FinOps.
• Deep insights: Trusted by customers to manage their mission-critical workloads, Kyndryl’s 30+ years of architecting and operating our customers’ complex IT environments enables the team to have deep domain expertise into the interplay between technology and costs, IT cost models and governance, and the ability to extend FinOps beyond dynamic, cloud-driven costs to include traditional IT costs.

The image below presents the cost dashboard displaying costs by multiple dimensions, such as by cloud providers, subscription accounts, and service category type.  

Figure 3 – Kyndryl Bridge segment charts.

The next image presents the insights dashboard displaying a summary of optimization recommendations with projected potential savings to help users identify impactful areas of improvements.

Figure 4 – Kyndryl Bridge insights dashboard.

Lastly, the following image presents costs over time compared against allocated monthly budgets. This enables timely data-driven decisions during assessment of monthly spend against assigned budgets. 

Figure 5 – Kyndryl Bridge cost and budget tracking.

Conclusion

Kyndryl FinOps leverages the company’s expertise, experience, proven methodology, and technology to help optimize your AWS and other cloud investments. Collaborating with AWS to support the FinOps solution, Kyndryl’s professional team and platform help you build an ongoing operation to reap the benefit of increased financial governance.

Ready to kickstart FinOps in your organization? Try one of Kyndryl’s FinOps and cost optimization assessments conducted by 150+ FinOps Certified practitioners to understand your company’s FinOps goals and optimization potentials.

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Kyndryl – AWS Partner Spotlight

Kyndryl is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and MSP that’s a global IT infrastructure services provider that serves 1000+ clients and relentlessly innovating to help customers manage SAP applications on AWS.

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