Using less to achieve sustainability

During AWS re:Invent 2022 in Las Vegas, I attended a few sessions on sustainability in the cloud. One of the things that stood out to me and has kept my mind occupied since is the question: “Are we taking the right course of action?” It’s clear that there is still a lot of work to do to make the cloud more energy sustainable.

The angle I don’t see tackled as much in the meantime shifting to a focus on efficiency. While people are warming up to pushing for high levels of resource efficiency through FinOps and GreenOps principles, there is also a case to be made to push for operational efficiency. I firmly believe that “use less” is key to achieving sustainability in various aspects.

Operating at scale

One of the big issues I still see in the IT landscape today is that a lot of organizations try to do everything in-house, which often leads to a lot of legacy set-ups, architecture lock- ins and technical debt. Compare it to doing Christmas shopping. Take a street with 10 cars. These 10 cars all drive off to various stores, on multiple trips, maybe coming back without finding the gifts they need. That’s a lot of emissions for maybe a handful of gifts. Now, imagine these 10 households all do their shopping online and let package delivery services handle the door-to-door process. One delivery van might deliver the same amount of gifts to that street and then some. It’s all a matter of consolidating tasks and handling them in an efficient way.

It’s not impossible to do cloud operations internally in an efficient way, but it requires a level of investment and dedication that is doesn’t always align with budgets, goals and bottom lines. Managed services providers strive for operational excellence and operational efficiency. We make sure that whatever we manage is kept in line with business needs in an efficient way. Like a delivery van, we consolidate knowledge and expertise and dedicate resources to carry out cloud operations 24/7, which we can do because we operate at scale. That scale also allows us to rapidly gain experience and continuously improve. We improve the operational efficiency of your cloud environment, which leads to achieving more with less.

Want to know more about how we can drive sustainability through maximum efficiency? Reach out to us!

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War for talent is a growing problem

The huge gap between supply and demand has created a large number of potential openings for each talented job seeker. This has led a lot of people to quit their jobs for whatever carrots other employers dangle in front of them. In this worker’s market employers are battling to find and retain talent by making compensation and benefits packages as attractive as possible and offering the flexibility to work from home that many people became accustomed to during the pandemic.

Today’s employees are in a position to demand more work-life balance, a sense of purpose and more wellbeing. At the same time the war for talent is creating more expense and cutting into margins already suffering from inflation. This sometimes creates precarious situations for employers fighting to stay in business without adequate staff.

A fast-changing tech landscape

Meanwhile, the tech revolution is radically reshaping the type of talent needed for businesses to thrive. Skills such as problem-solving, critical thinking and creativity are becoming more essential. Traditional talent pools are drying up, necessitating the upskilling and cultivation of talent in places where companies don’t typically look for them.

Because of the difficulty and expense in finding and recruiting new profiles, retention has become a major pillar in the war for talent. It has become a must to focus on upskilling and re-skilling existing employees as well as to provide ample opportunities for career growth and personal development. Company culture has also become vital to keeping people on board. Companies are finding out just how essential it is to have a motivating culture and a good value alignment among their team. This makes it all the more essential to nurture existing staff who have already proved their commitment to company values fulfilled and happy.

The constant evolution of the tech landscape and the new skills it demands mean that continuous investment is needed in training and retraining. It’s not easy for companies to organize all of that in-house. Often you require quickly deployable knowledge from someone who is already experienced in that area. Deploying specialists instead of hiring niche profiles at high expense who may not even stay on long-term also creates room to give your own people the opportunity to expand their own knowledge as well as lightening their workload.

You’ll always be in the driver’s seat

So what now? The good news is that companies like Cloudar can be counted on for a high level of internal knowledge sharing and continuous training. We keep our advanced tech and soft skills sharp so that other companies can benefit from them. Our customers can profit from our expertise in a lot of different ways: on a project basis, through flex consultation, or as a member of your permanent team. We also collaborate with you to strengthen your internal profiles through training courses and workshops. That’s true partnership!

The war for talent doesn’t have to be fought alone. We’ll be at your side to provide the AWS expertise and guidance you need while your team gain new skills. Get in touch!

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FinOps: Consolidated tooling space

While there were no straightforward announcements done by AWS on the FinOps front, a lot of things were said and shown during the sessions. While we can’t make all of it publicly known yet, it is clear that AWS is consolidating their tooling space, which consists of three parts: Billing, Analysis and Visualization.

• Billing: AWS is strengthening the Billing Conductor they released earlier this year and releasing some features that were previously only available to customers through third-party tooling. The fact that they can push CURs for specific billing groups natively (though the cost remains steep), is interesting because it feeds nicely into their visualization tooling.
• Analysis: Cost Explorer had received a visual update just before re:Invent, but other than that no real announcements were made. We talked to some people about the checkboxes, and the general sense is that grouping by multiple layers will come out soon, making Cost Explorer even stronger in comparison to the current version.
• Visualization: the CUDOS or Cloud Intelligence Dashboards were omnipresent at re:Invent, and AWS is really investing in the tool. The fact that customers can use the separate CUR files of the AWS Billing Conductor to create different dashboards for different subsets of accounts is powerful. If this were to become a service or something that you don’t have to build and maintain yourself, it could really rival some of the existing tooling out there.

Right now these three parts are developed by three teams and not really coupled together. They function differently, are priced and billed differently and require quite a lot of custom development to get to a level where third party tools are out of the box. The fact that you can’t carry over billing groups into a restrictive view in Cost Explorer or automate reporting from a Cost Explorer report (the sending of the report that is), are some basic functions that we still miss. Still, AWS is investing in the native tools and investing properly, with attention to feedback from the user community. This is great to see!

GreenOps: Still a long road ahead

On the sustainability front, it was nice to hear AWS pledge on water positivity by 2030. But there is still much work to be done to make the cloud greener. The current reporting on carbon emissions is not up to standard yet, and it does not integrate with for example a QuickSight dashboard or other dashboarding tools. A discussion on what information is really relevant concerning sustainable resource efficiency is also necessary. Why don’t we start looking at the energy consumption of AWS resources? If AWS data centers are truly carbon neutral by 2025, is this not something we should start incorporating in our logged metrics?

While re:Invent gave us a great feeling in terms of FinOps and AWS’s awareness of cost analysis and cost optimization tools, GreenOps seems like it has yet to earn a serious seat at the table aside from having a reporting tool available and some key pledges to improve their ecological footprint.

What did you take away from re:Invent, or what changes in the world of cloud computing would you like to see? Together we can build a sustainable future!

The post re:Invent 2022: General takeaways on FinOps & GreenOps appeared first on Cloudar.

Taking control of your AWS costs

Since the AWS cloud provides over 200 services, sometimes organizations lose track of the big picture when it comes to costs. Underutilized instances, unused EBS volumes, skipping on saving plans, unimplemented autoscaling: these are some of the major culprits that lead to bloated bills.

Luckily there are plenty of ways to cut the fat and get the most out of AWS. AWS has the tools to allow you to take control of your costs and optimize your spend. The beauty of AWS is the flexibility to manage your costs while keeping the capacity you need to build modern, scalable applications. AWS Cost Explorer is a useful tool to help you visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time. To help optimize your costs, actions can be grouped along the following five pillars.

5 keys to AWS cost optimization

• Right-size your resources: Scale your instances to the right size. Get a good overview of your usage using AWS Cost Explorer Resource Optimization to get a report of EC2 instances that are either idle or have low utilization, and stop or downsize these instances. Use the AutoScaling feature to automatically scale (in and out) your DynamoDB table. Review networking and reduce costs by deleting idle load balancers. Identify Amazon EBS volumes with low utilization and delete them.
• Stretch your elasticity: Turn resources off when you don’t need them. That’s the advantage of the cloud model over hardware! One tip is to create schedules to turn off unused instances during idle times with the help of usage metrics. Keep an eye also on EBS quantities when your instances are not in use.
• Choose the right pricing model: AWS offers various pricing models to manage your costs, including on-demand pricing, Spot Instances, and Reserved Instances. Compare the pros and cons of each for your requirements. For example, Spot Instances can save you up to 90% but are not ideal for mission-critical use as they can be reclaimed and terminated last-minute. They are ideal for applications that are fault-tolerant, scalable, or flexible. You can also save up to 72% by signing up to Savings Plans, a flexible pricing model that offers lower prices on Amazon EC2 instances usage.
• Optimize storage: AWS offers a choice of storage tiers that provide different performance and costs. Optimize storage while maintaining performance and availability by identifying the right destination for different data types. Essentially you want to have easier access to certain priority data and use another tier for archives and other data that you rarely need to access. Use S3 Analytics to analyze storage access patterns on the object data set and reduce cost by leveraging lower cost storage tiers.
• Measure, monitor & improve: establish metrics and monitor the cloud environment for continuous cost optimization. Set specific targets and review your metrics on a regular basis. Support teams in architecting for cost and identify team members responsible for optimization. Define and enforce cost allocation tagging for more visibility among teams.

We can help

Optimizing your AWS costs takes expertise. AWS managed service providers like Cloudar know all the tricks and can help you pricing models and stay on top of your usage and resources. To improve cost optimization and maximize your business value, it pays to partner up!

Want to get a better idea for how we could help you get the most out of AWS? Reach out to us!

The post Maximize your value: How to Improve AWS Cost Optimization appeared first on Cloudar.

Taking control of the balance between your cloud cost and the business value achieved is challenging. Cloud Financial Management is a detailed, complex discipline that requires people to collaborate with stakeholders across their organization. Most of reviews on the market today offer to assess how well you implement their flavor of FinOps and their framework. We on the other hand, want to assess how and where you can improve your own concrete FinOps practice. Our tool is based on nearly a decade of AWS experience, numerous green-field set-ups, migrations, optimizations, custom development tracks and more.

The Cloudar FinOps Review incorporates our own lessons learned and experience, ensuring that our questions and criteria are paired with no-nonsense, actionable measures that let you start optimizing directly. Even better, Cloudar can give you a hand: we have the knowledge and resources to back up your implementation and optimization track. With over 100+ AWS certifications, we deliver quality work and always strive for excellence.

The post Releasing the Cloudar FinOps Review: everything you should know! appeared first on Cloudar.

Ease of mind

With FinOps Shared Responsibility Model organizations can rest assured that cost optimization doesn’t just rest on their shoulders. Together with a FinOps expert the customer can share the responsibility of cost efficient working in the cloud on all levels of the operation. The FinOps expert will lay out guidelines and install the necessary guard rails. They will take on cost monitoring and rate optimization. The company’s engineers on the other hand are responsible for the cost efficiency of their solutions and architecture.

Putting it into practice

If you want to make shared responsibility work and engage all stakeholders in doing their part, clear communication and reliable data monitoring are key. Consistent monitoring and reporting are essential if you strive to produce trustworthy data. Which you definitely want if you are looking to optimize your operational costs. They allow companies to evaluate where you need to invest more or maybe less. With correct data, honest communication and critical analysis, an organization can quickly determine where they can innovate and finetune their processes. And more so: how they can do this within their budget and at minimal cost. Maybe even freeing up resources for taking their operations to the next level.

Want to know more about FinOps Shared Responsibility Model? Read all about it in this article by the FinOps Alliance. If you want to prevent losing oversight or getting caught in the details, partnering up with a FinOps specialist can save you a lot of headache. Cloudar is a very proud member of the FinOps Alliance. Be sure to contact us if you want to hear how we can help you optimize your cloud costs.

The post How the FinOps Shared Responsibility Model can help you optimize cloud costs appeared first on Cloudar.

The current FinOps philosophy is mainly dominated by the principles, phases and capabilities provided and described by the FinOps Foundation. For people looking to take their first steps into Cloud Financial Management, that is a solid place to start. In general, the FinOps Foundation (or F2) Framework provides a set of rules to keep in mind (the principles), a suggestion of phases to split your adoption in and a list of tasks that can give you an idea of the responsibilities for a FinOps team.

In tandem with the development of the F2 Framework, AWS started growing the cost-optimization pillar of their Well-Architected Framework into the AWS Cloud Financial Management framework. In it, they provide four pillars to structure your cloud financial practice. Where the F2 Framework preaches Inform, Optimize and Operate as key parts of the FinOps adoption journey, AWS tells you to build on the pillars of See, Save, Plan and Run.

After talking with people from both AWS and the FinOps Foundation, I think this is the best way to compare the two: The F2 Framework is a holistic, culture-focused approach that seeks to provide a frame of reference when implementing FinOps in your organization. The AWS Cloud Financial Management framework is more hands-on, more technical and strives to establish a practice within the existing company culture.

I’m sure that with the growth of FinOps in the tech landscape, new frameworks and ways of approaching Financial Operations in the Cloud will emerge. While it is always good to not have to start from scratch with something, we shouldn’t forget that FinOps happens in the field. If you Google “DevOps Principles”, you get one blog saying there are seven core principles, another saying there are three, and yet another claiming the real number is five. The truth is, DevOps (and likewise FinOps), is whatever you need and build in your own organization.

FinOps is at its core a grassroots practice that can be aided, but not dictated, by a framework. Do what works for your company, be inspired, change the principles, pillars and phases to terminology that works for you. The right approach is the one that helps you reach your FinOps goals. In the end, adopting FinOps is about internalizing FinOps in your organization, not about adopting a framework.

The post Do what works: choosing the right FinOps approach appeared first on Cloudar.

Real-time feedback

According to J. R. Storment, there are three parts to a successful FinOps practice: Real-time reporting, just in-time processes and teams working together. The feedback loop of real-time reporting is crucial to taking control of your financial footprint in the cloud. Diving into tools such as AWS Cost Explorer or Cloudcheckr to analyze and understand your AWS usage costs are a good way to build out that real-time feedback loop. The real challenge of having a useful, valuable feedback loop is in structuring it. This is where having a clear framework is essential.

There are a lot of possible frameworks to consider in structuring the flow and usage of data. The framework that I have found most helpful is one I picked up during leadership training with retired US Navy Seals. They introduced me to the work of John Boyd, a United States Air Force Colonel and military strategist. Boyd developed the OODA loop: a framework that became the golden standard for combat operational processes.

The OODA loop

Military operators from every branch are taught to use the OODA loop when overwhelmed on the battlefield. Reverting to a specific framework in high pressure situations helps them stay focused and steer clear of information overload-induced paralysis. This framework is now widely used in business, leadership, litigation and law enforcement, but is also very applicable to the practice of FinOps.

OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide and Act. When engaging with clients on their financial cloud footprint, we often focus on Observing and are in a constant state of Orienting. We tag and categorize our AWS resources (Observe) and maybe set up automated reporting and alerting. Then, in a best-case scenario, dedicated resources are applied to analyzing the cloud bill and reporting on the numbers to upper management. However, those are only two of the four steps of the feedback loop: we still haven’t gotten to Decide and Act.

Every manager will advocate that data analysis should lead to decisions and subsequent actions, but most of the time that is not in the format of a loop. When looking at cloud costs, many managers see action as the goal to finalize a project. The truth is, making a decision and taking action will feed new observations, which then trigger new orientation of data, and so the circle begins again. Every time you observe your cloud bill, have the conversation around what you are seeing (Orient), decide on next actions and act on those decisions. The review and retrospective discussions on those actions will start a new observation, orientation, decision and action loop.

The loop builds culture

When you start using the OODA framework to structure real-time reporting and the feedback loop, you provide a solid basis to keep a continuous conversation going and grow FinOps culture in your organization. If you are looking to get a better grip on your cloud bill, you absolutely want to gather as much data as possible. Using the principles of Observe, Orient, Decide and Act, you can stop your team from being paralyzed by the flood of information and actively cycle your way forward to a healthier financial cloud footprint.

Want to know more about how to optimize costs and innovate faster? Check out our AWS FinOps solution. 

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