Cloud Financial Management (Cloud FinOps)

the strategy i used to save my firm $8m

hello avatars, celt here to tell you about Cloud FinOps or CFM. Controlling cloud costs has quickly become a hot topic in the cloud engineering community. You might have even seen it referenced when elon took over titter, article here. If you do not know what youre doing you can easily rack up an ugly bill with a cloud provider. Many people have horror stories like this, and AWS is notoriously bad at some of the cost controls and visibility when compared to Azure or GCP. I will be focusing on AWS but the majority of this post is applicable to any provider. AWS recently released this whitepaper: AWS Cloud Financial Management Whitepaper which caused me to make a longer post about this. Do not waste your time reading that paper, it is not very good and *way too* long. Pay attention, people have literally bankrupted their startup because of cloud bills, dont believe me here.

Cloud Financial Management Principles

At a high level there are guiding principles to follow to look at cloud costs

• Implement and evangelize cloud financial management.

From the AWS Cloud Financial Management Whitepaper:

"Your organization must dedicate the necessary time and resources for building capability in this new domain of technology and usage management."

this sounds *very* similar to something I said in this post:

What Your Cloud Provider Won't Tell You (AWS, GCP, Azure)

You need to constantly be bringing up with your solutions architects or professional services people if there is a way to optimize cost on the architecture, and investigate. Otherwise, the cloud provider does not have much of an incentive to optimize your costs as chances are you wouldn’t notice. It is best to have some people looking at costs and determining where there is an opportunity to reduce costs.

Seems like I was onto something. If you do not make a legit effort to control your costs, evangelize cost saving practices, best practices, and align silos you *will* end up ballooning your cloud costs. I have seen it often.