It isn’t rocket science. Really.
Pursuing the perfect end-user experience, cloud services are incredibly easy to spin up, and much harder to restrain. None of us wants to be responsible for downtime just when business is booming. We therefore overprovision and overspend, making cloud computing, storage and networking services growing line items in our budgets.
Hence the emergence of FinOps as a set of practices to control cloud-related costs. But these processes are so time-consuming to manage manually, you might end up just internally shifting overspend.
Cloud costs can be cloudy
As the company and business evolves, so do the related cloud costs. New products and features require various cloud services billed by different parameters, such as number of requests, volume of content in GB, on-demand vs. reserved instances, geographic locations, and many more. It’s hard to keep track of each line item, consumption trends and know which team or business unit is responsible for it. It’s even harder to forecast and plan a budget for cloud related services as usage can be unpredictable and volatile.
On one hand the agility of the developer teams is crucial to keep innovating and delivering new capabilities to customers. Cloud services were designed to make it easy and quick to consume exactly for that reason. On the other hand, the business has to control expenses and reasonably invest resources in the most efficient manner.
Our solution
To address this issue we recently launched our FinOps / Cloud Cost Optimization service offering. Our solutions help companies gain visibility and control over their cloud-related costs, with ongoing monitoring and proactive cost optimization.
We help both development and finance stakeholders to become more educated about cloud cost optimization options, map the company’s entire cloud related costs based on team, business unit or product, then analyze the potential cost savings and get to work on implementing them based on their impact to the bottom line.
On top of the industry best practices, we get creative and fit the right optimization based on the cloud workload use-case and industry. We even found out that in some scenarios adding CDN to the mix can actually reduce the overall cost of cloud operations.
To sum it up…
Cloud Cost Optimization, or FinOps, can mean different things to different companies. Some optimizations are trivial quick wins, some require in-depth planning. Some are relevant across many cloud workloads, while others are case-specific.
It’s really a perpetual effort – you constantly need to analyze your overall costs, then choose and implement the most relevant, impactful optimizations, and finally measure the overall cost savings.
Here at GlobalDots, we regularly save our customers significant amounts off of their cloud-related costs, while increasing their predictability. It takes holistic, business-oriented analysis, lots of expertise, and a healthy portion of creativity. And we never rest – there’s always more to be done and discovered.
