Beyond cloud cost tooling and budget alerts – is the cloud driving real business value for you?

The dynamic nature of the cloud requires enterprises to rethink technology cost management. Procurement, finance, contracting, engineering, and audit teams must adapt to the transience and variability of AWS cloud infrastructure, which can create organizational friction if they attempt to manage cloud costs using traditional methods.

New tools and analytics that adapt to the dynamic nature of AWs cloud cost management can provide accurate forecasting and budgeting. But tools alone cannot align cloud costs to the business value generated by those resources. This requires a true partnership and concerted effort between Finance, Procurement, Technology, and Business/Product to establish organizational accountability measure and improve the business value that AWS cloud drives.

The work delivered by our consulting team will impact associated AWS cloud spend for compute and storage across services such as: Amazon EC2, Amazon EMR, Amazon S3, Amazon Aurora, Amazon RDS, and Amazon SageMaker.

During the phases of this offer you will establish and mature the three critical elements of effective cloud cost management:

Report Usage and Trajectory

• Ensure correct cost attribution through tagging and data governance
• Provide accurate forecasting via trend analysis and technology roadmap integration

Data Driven Decisions

• Democratize analytics to encourage proactive resource pruning by engineering teams
• Align cloud value to the enterprise through consistent ROI/TCO analysis across business units

Cost-Efficient Platform Engineering

• Address residual technical debt and leverage cloud effectively by remediating “lift and shift” workloads
• Identify high value modernization opportunities by regularly assessing workloads against an ideal cloud-native architecture

FinOps and Cloud Cost Management Offer

Our FinOps engagements typically consist of three phases, any of which can be modified to suit your organization’s needs:

Phase 1: Discovery & Analysis (4 weeks)

Outcomes: At the end of this phase, you will:

• Understand how to align your cloud costs to business value
• Have a backlog of tactical action items that can be done to reduce cloud spend, focusing on rightsizing, resource decommissioning, and scheduling
• Understand what is required to build the reporting and dashboards to provide effective Governance in Phase 3
• Receive a high-level estimate of cost reduction benefits in later phases

Tasks: Work done during this phase:

• Determine if cloud spend is accurately and correctly attributed, and work with Engineering to fix where it is not
• Deploy required tools and processes to identify orphaned or idle resources Evaluate workloads and spend patterns to prune unused resources or right-size images
• Analyze recently cloud spend patterns to assess accuracy and identify how they can be automated

Phase 2: Tactical Wins (4-8 weeks)

Outcomes: At this end of this phase, you will:

• Realize lower cloud costs with the implementation of the backlog built in Phase 1
• Have an implementation plan and a backlog of action items to reduce cloud spend at a strategic, longer-term level

Tasks: Example of work done during this phase (based on findings during Phase 1):

• Prune unused VMs, right size & downsize compute & storage, migrate 24x7 workloads to on-demand patterns
• Implement scheduling for development and test environments
• Decommission resources
• Implement Reserved Instances & other cost savings plans
• Implement cost management policies
• Lead workshops to identify DevOps automation and standards/process improvements

Phase 3: Automation, Governance & FinOps  (8-12 weeks)

Outcomes: At this end of this phase, you will:

• Realize lower cloud costs with the implementation of the backlog built in Phase 1
• See your Finance, Technology, and Business/Product teams working together using a standardized language and accurate and automated reporting to manage cloud spend with shared accountability

Tasks: Example work done during this phase (based on findings during Phases 1 & 2):

• Configure anomaly alerts and reports
• Implement continuous resource tagging
• Create a Target Operating Model for cost management with Business, Technology & Finance
• Measure and monitor cloud resource usage, automate response to demand (scale in/out)
• Implement DevOps automation to simplify scaling/scheduling (e.g., environments on demand, rather than 24x7)
• Adopt cloud native architecture for responsive scaling
• Simplify adoption of scaling & scheduling
• Implement an ongoing Cost Governance process that defines owners and establishes accountability, set and review budgets, and builds unity among stakeholders.