At Cloudar, we pride ourselves on being the only local Premier AWS partner in Belgium. While global system integrators (GSIs) offer their services on a massive scale, we believe that being a smaller, local player comes with unique advantages. In this post, we’ll explore the benefits of partnering with a local AWS expert like us compared to working with a large GSI.

1. Personalized Attention and Customized Solutions

Unlike larger firms where clients might feel like just another number, we provide personalized attention to each of our clients. Our team takes the time to understand your specific needs, crafting customized AWS solutions that align perfectly with your business objectives. This tailored approach ensures that your company receives the exact support it needs to thrive.

2. Agility and Flexibility

In today’s fast-paced business world, agility is key. Our smaller size allows us to make quick decisions and adapt to your needs rapidly. This flexibility extends to our service offerings, ensuring scalability that supports your business’s growth every step of the way.

3. Local Market Understanding

Our in-depth knowledge of the Belgian market sets us apart. We’re not just AWS experts; we’re experts in how AWS services can best be utilized in Belgium, considering local regulations and market trends. This local insight is invaluable for ensuring compliance and tailoring solutions that work best in our specific market environment.

4. Direct Communication and Stronger Relationships

Working with us means you’ll have direct access to our team of experts. At Cloudar we don’t work with offshoring or nearshoring. This ease of communication fosters stronger, more meaningful relationships. We’re not just a service provider; we’re a partner invested in understanding and contributing to the long-term success of your business.

5. Competitive Pricing and Cost-Effectiveness

We offer competitive pricing that challenges larger GSIs, ensuring that you receive top-notch AWS services without an exorbitant price tag. This cost-effectiveness is part of our commitment to providing value, ensuring that your investment in AWS services yields the maximum return.

6. Community Engagement and Support

As a local business, we’re deeply involved in the Belgian community. We believe in supporting local initiatives and contributing to the local economy. By choosing us, you’re not just getting an AWS partner; you’re contributing to the broader community and fostering local business ecosystem growth.

Choosing a local AWS partner like Cloudar offers a range of benefits that large global system integrators can’t match. From personalized service to local market expertise, our team is dedicated to providing the best possible AWS solutions tailored to your specific needs. If you’re looking for an AWS partner that values your business and is committed to your success, look no further. Contact us today to discuss how we can help your business thrive with AWS.

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Getting people to include Cloud financial management and FinOps principles in their daily operation of the cloud is what FinOps professionals like me have been striving for. With FinOps principles integrated more and more into standard cloud practice, an interesting question arises: should the FinOps engineer and the cloud engineer be two separate roles?

If we take DevOps as a precedent, we could argue that there is no way to do cloud engineering without being knowledgeable about DevOps principles and practices. The same could be said of FinOps: It is impossible to do quality cloud engineering without being aware of FinOps principles and best practices.

But wait, isn’t there a shared responsibility model for FinOps too? If we take that shared responsibility model, we can add the “cost efficiency in the cloud” to the responsibilities of the cloud engineers. That leaves us with the “cost efficiency of the cloud”, which surely means FinOps is here to stay? Yes and no. While the knowledge to properly ensure cost efficiency of the cloud is highly specific, the role filling up this layer of the FinOps shared responsibility model is akin to that of a program manager. Say hello to the FinOps Program Manager!

As FinOps becomes more of a tool in the toolbox of Cloud engineers rather than a separate practice (as should be the case), we need Program Managers to maintain and manage FinOps as a program within organizations. FinOps Program Managers are responsible for distributing knowledge, enabling managers and engineers in their access to the right information and making sure the organization has a clear way forward in developing FinOps.

In essence, FinOps becomes a knowledge space or practice utilized by cloud engineers and the program to ensure the cloud is adopted properly within the organization’s tech landscape. A dedicated FinOps profile is responsible for gathering and maintaining that knowledge. In practice, we often see this person and the FinOps Program Manager being one and the same. They are the driving force in gathering and maintaining cloud billing and cost optimization knowledge and supporting FinOps program management efforts within the organization. Based on their efforts, managers and cloud engineers can make informed decisions and have productive conversations on how to improve their cost efficiency in the cloud.

The bottom line: For FinOps to succeed in an organization, there is a strong need for a FinOps Program Manager who can lead up and down the chain of command and steer the course to keeping the shared responsibility model for FinOps in place.

Want some support to help your company get the most out of the cloud? Reach out to us!

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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 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.

#1 Business value 

This principle demands that decision-making is driven by the business value of the cloud. The team that manages your cloud setup should always keep in mind how they can optimize the business value when building, designing and finetuning your cloud infrastructure. With the help of FinOps, you can evaluate your results by comparing them with your industry peers. Learn from best practices and let team benchmarking drive you to improve and excel.

#2 Centralization 

FinOps needs a centralized and committed team to run smoothly and efficiently. Financial data should be collected and analyzed in one place. This ensures general oversight into cloud costs and spending. The need to up- or downscale and any opportunity to optimize the budget becomes visible a lot faster. Any additional purchases or negotiations can be combined to receive the best possible pricing.

#3 Collaboration 

For FinOps to work, all the teams involved need to collaborate consistently. This thorough way of collaborating will allow for your teams to learn from each other. They will be able to build on that new knowledge and constantly review their way of working, which will level up their workflow and processes. Collaboration encourages teams to take a fresh look at their tasks from the point of view of their collaborators. It will encourage them to try new things and take into account how their actions might affect their fellow collaborators. This ultimately results in enhanced creativity, innovation and efficiency.

#4 Opportunity

Working in the cloud comes with a whole new range of opportunities. Organizations are able to design their cloud infrastructure to perfectly fit their needs. This is not a static situation: it can be scaled up and down as needed. This customizability also means that you only pay for what you actually use. Make sure you make the best use of the variable cost model the cloud has to offer to get the most out of your budget.

#5 Ownership

FinOps can only work if all involved cloud users take ownership of how they use the cloud environment. Each team needs to feel empowered enough to take responsibility for their own cloud budget and usage. A very useful tool to use is to set team-level targets. Every cloud collaborator will feel accountable and eager to achieve their targets, and every team member will feel involved and carry their own weight.

#6 Transparency

The only way FinOps can generate trustworthy results is by making sure the data is collected and analyzed correctly and consistently. This data can then be translated into reports for further follow-up. It’s very important that these reports are generated on a regular basis. They should be made accessible to all the teams involved. Fast feedback gives you the chance to react and adjust when necessary.

Cloudar is an active member of the FinOps Alliance. Do you need guidance on implementing the principles of FinOps? Do you want to optimize your cloud spendure without losing oversight? Contact us and let’s find out how we can help make these principles a part of your organization’s culture!

The post Your guiding lights: The 6 principles of FinOps 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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