This leaves us with two options to retrieve this billing forecast data:

1. Make API calls to the billing API to retrieve the forecast data
2. Use linear regression outside of cloud billing to calculate billing forecast.

Here is a link to a sample looker query analyzing the spend trend (forecast) for a billing dataset.

AWS FinOps – The Basics – In Practice, how does FinOps work?

Now that we’ve covered the theoretical foundation of finops, let us put everything in practice.

We will optimize compute costs on AWS — using two separate approaches.

Say you’ve used AWS’ Cost Explorer to export billing data into s3. And you’ve built a set of reports / dashboards off that data (Using Athena and Quicksight).

Now, you are in a place to actually start addressing those expensive resources. How and where do you start? I will present at least 2 approaches here (I have about a dozen more in my repertoire).

Approach 1 — Use AWS Config Rules combined with AWS Systems Manager.

For those familiar with these services, AWS Config can alert you of non compliant resources. And systems manager can automatically do something about those resources (remediate them). The remediation can occur either as soon as possible or can be based on an approval workflow.

Approach 2 — Use Cloudwatch, SNS and Lambda’s deadly combo

This is one of my favorite ways to remediate resources (it also happens to incur the lowest cost). As an example, let us say we want to shut down inactive EC2 instances, to cut down on wasteful compute costs.

• Step 1 — Set up a CloudWatch Alarm. Use the Inactivity Timer (CW EC2 Metric Name = Active Sessions) based CW Alarm.
• Step 2 — Set up an SNS Topic. This topic is what is written to by the CloudWatch Alarm in step 1.
• Step 3 — Set up a Lambda function to subscribe to the SNS topic. This Lambda triggers when topic has a new CW event published. The Lambda takes the Instance Id and shuts down the EC2 instance.

Contact

Contact a cloud finops engineer and a certified finops practitioner  today to help with your FinOps journey.

While FinOps may just sound like a buzzword that repackaged Cost Optimization concepts, it does go well beyond that. It includes assigning ownership and responsibility (usually within a CCOE). It tries to pull all stakeholders under a single umbrella to ultimately provide better cost management and better operational cloud insights.

This typically involves re-working the entire procurement and cloud cost management lifecycle, with the help of a certified FinOps professional.

Isn’t FinOps just Financial Operations?

It used to be just Cloud Financial Operations, but that term is falling out of favor due to its ambiguity.

So FinOps is about gaining visibility into cloud costs?

As a first step, yes.

This step is called the ‘Inform’ step in FinOps. From here, you actually optimize by addressing some of your larger resource spends. And then, you continue to optimize as part of your operations management.

That’s it in a nutshell. Inform → Optimize → Operate.

Now, you are a FinOps expert as well!

What are some aspects of Cloud FinOps?

FinOps consists of a set of Principles, Personas and Phases.

The SIX FinOps Principles

1. Collaboration
2. Accessible Reports
3. Shared Responsibility
4. Centralized FinOps Center
5. Business Value driven spend decisions
6. Leverage the Variable Cost Model of the Cloud

Each of these is self explanatory, and is practiced in most cloud environments INDEPENDENTLY. FinOps tries to pull these under a single umbrella — under the Cloud Center of Excellence.

Billing data is notoriously difficult to understand and parse. Part of it has to do with the nested structure of the data exported from the billing accounts. A cloud finops specialist can help make sense of the data and present it in the form of easy to understand visualizations.

What deliverables apart from the dashboards, can I expect from a Finops Engineer?

1. Spend Trend Report (Current State)
2. Optimization Report (Future state)

Per BU

1. 1. Right-sizing
   2. Right-typing
   3. Idle & Orphaned resources
   4.  Worst offenders & top performers – month over month

Per Workload/App

• Right-sizing
• Right-typing
• Idle & Orphaned resources
• Spend vs business value metrics

Contact

also read – Isn’t FinOps just a new buzzword?

Contact a cloud finops engineer and a certified finops practitioner  today to help with your FinOps journey.