Welcome to my first post about FinOps! It absolutely should be about tagging/labeling because that is foundational to everything and if you get it wrong, nothing else matters. It’s table stakes. It’s essential. It’s all the jargon meaning you must get it right. I’ll address it some other day.
Instead, I want to talk about two types of optimization opportunities: Mountains and Molehills.
Tiny Little Inefficiencies
Let’s start with molehills. We all have them. They are the little tiny inefficiencies that on their own waste less money than it would take to fix them. These are the opportunities that get FinOps practitioners dirty looks from engineers. Some engineers may even give you a few dollars to cover the waste and tell you to never bother them again. This may be a win-win for some, but it is not a sustainable solution.
Without addressing molehills, they will continue to multiply until one day you will go outside in your yard and won’t be able to move without stepping in one. You’ll look around and think: I hate it here.
While individually, molehills aren’t worth your time, in aggregate, they have the power to ruin everything and drive your cloud spend out of control. The most effective way to manage molehill optimization opportunities is automated compliance.
Find the engineer who paid you the most amount of money to go away, and ask them if they will create a script that takes care of the problem automatically. (Secret tip: having trouble getting engineers to take action? It’s the approach: ask them to script the solution. Automation is like catnip to them. They won’t be able to resist.)
Untagged resources? Script a policy that won’t allow resources to launch without the required tag. Abandoned storage volumes? Script scanning for and deleting them. Not shutting down compute resources at night? Script them to shut down each night based on a tag. Want to turn compute back on? Do that manually. Are multipart uploads bogging down your object storage? Lifecycle rules. All of these examples are basic compliance. Automate them once and keep an eye out on the spend to check the scripts don’t break (they will).
Value On The Horizon
Now that your molehills are cleared up - you can go after those mountains in the distance. These are the optimization opportunities that can transform value. Things like adopting cloud-native services, moving to containers, managing provisioned IOPS, and everyone’s least favorite, architecting to minimize data transfer costs. I used the keyword in the last example: architecture. Mountains are cleared through architecture.
FinOps Practitioners are secret cloud architects. Once you see enough solutions and the cloud services they are leveraging, you will pick up how the components fit together. Your superpower is understanding how each of those components drives spend. Based on that knowledge, you can make recommendations on configurations. Write it down on a piece of paper, draw some shapes and arrows around all of that, and - VIOLA! - you are an architect. (Well, maybe not, but no one will be able to prove you aren’t.) My point is that you need to address the structure of the application to unlock the value hidden in the design.
The problem with molehills is that individually they do not seem worth anyone’s time to engage with. The problem with mountains is that they can seem too intimidating to take on. None of the mountain optimizations fall on the simple side of the spectrum. They will require your time and attention - which you now have more of because you’ve automated compliance on your molehills. Some mountains may require project funding. Some may require coding changes to the application. All will require collaboration between multiple teams.
When approaching mountains, make sure you have your data in good shape. Of course, it will be because you’ve either read the tagging post I have yet to write or you automated your tagging compliance. Know your TCO. Estimate the impact of the benefit. Make a clear target that everyone understands and that you can measure the success against and learnings that you earn along the way.
Playlist Theme: Summertime Pool Party
We are smack-dab in the middle of pool lounging season where I live. You need songs that bridge generations connecting the physically young and the mentally young. The songs have to flow with each other. The last thing you want is someone turning their head and saying ‘what the hell is this?’ Here is a selection from my family’s pool party list:
Heat Waves - Glass Animals
Private Eyes - Hall & Oates
Shambala - Three Dog Night
Hold My Hand - Hootie & The Blowfish
Don’t Start Now - Dua Lipa
The FinOps & Playlists Playlist: