FinOps on the way vol. 1

Preface

Though the phrase “FinOps” (Financial Operations) became very popular and knowledgeable in the industry, with the rising of cloud usage, not many people understand the profound impact of FinOps on the organization's revenue.

I am not going to explain all FinOps responsibilities (Who cares anyway?) But in a nutshell, FinOps main job is to optimize cloud costs or in other words to reduce costs and increase revenue.

There are many creative and uncreative ways to reduce cloud costs.

In the following blogs, I will share proper live case studies of real customers from verses industries and scales.

With no further ado, let’s begin...

Case study #1

How did we achieve a 66% reduction in cloud cost for an SMB healthcare business?

The client's main services were: EC2, Amazon elastic container service, Elastic load balancing, RDS & Amazon document DB (MongoDB).

We started their cost opt when the daily cost was around $62.

In February the daily cost was reduced to $21, a 66% decrease in the monthly bill which means a higher revenue every month.

So, what did we do?

These are the main methods we used for this account. Obviously, for each account and application, there are different methods that we apply, depending on the customer's needs.

EC2 Rightsizing- We did downsize to EC2 instances with a low CPU utilization, and a common use of memory (Requires shutdown of the instances).

EC2 Generation Upgrade- We updated the generation type to a newer version with better performance and lower energy consumption (for example- from t2 to t3).

EC2 Stopped Instances- When working with EC2 you pay for every hour that the instance is on (on demand), so when you switch the instance to off you don’t pay. However, you are still paying for the Volumes attached to the instances and for the IPs.

EBS Generation Upgrade- We updated the generation type to a newer version with better performance and lower energy consumption (for example- from GP2 to GP3). In the EBS upgrade, there is no downtime!

EBS Outdated snapshots- old snapshots that are no longer is needed. It is very important that when applying backups policies you also define the time limit for saving the snapshots!

Compute Saving Plan- Since the company is still considering changing the instances type and considering changing the current region, we choose the compute SP which is the most flexible.

In addition to the above methods, we used more techniques that are not listed above, and we examined more cost opt techniques which the company decided not to apply eventually for several reasons like Changing the type of EC2 instances, RDS RI, Elasticache RI, and more.

Let's book a meeting to find out the best cost-saving strategies for your cloud environment to make it more efficient and cost-effective.

*This content was not written by chatGPT *