Cost Savings Wombo Combo

In partnership with

What happened this week:

• AWS & Kubecost associated to try and save money in EKS

• AI is squeezing other IT departments. It started 🤖 

• Azure Knowledge & Announcements on FinOps. AWS as well.

• Mention of Honour: Podcast Release 🎙️ 

• Job Offers

• Professional Spotlight with an Entrepreneur in Cloud

Dropping great stuff. Enjoy yourself:

Collaborate with FinOps Weekly

AWS
It Takes Two to Save Kubernetes Money

AWS and Kubecost have teamed up to offer new features for Amazon EKS users at no extra cost.

Editor’s Comment: I’m unsure how this aligns with the acquisition of Kubecost by IBM we discussed in another edition.

Is AWS letting IBM access all those Kubernetes with a tool of a competitor for nothing?

K8s being “Cloud Agnostic”, could be a risky play from the #1 Cloud Provider.

For those interested, here’s what the new Kubecost 2.0 includes:

1. Network Monitoring: This helps track and understand network costs for pods, namespaces, clusters, and cloud services.

2. Actions: These are automated workflows to save money. They include:

   1. Dynamic request sizing to prevent waste

   2. Turning off clusters when not in use

3. Forecasting and Anomaly Detection: This uses machine learning to predict future costs and spot unusual spending.

4. Improved Performance: The system is now 100 times faster and 3 times more efficient with resources.

Install Kubecost on their Amazon EKS cluster using Helm. The process is simple and takes just a few minutes. Not Hell 🤡 

Kubecost has been one of the most valued tools across the Kubernetes Cost Savings market, and the recent movements are putting them in the scope

In partnership with FinOpsly
AI Copilot for FinOps

End-to-End FinOps.

Data at the speed of thought.

FinOps Empowered by AI.

AI
GenAI Investment Grows and Other IT Projects Get Squeezed

AI investment is expected to grow by 30% in 2024. Companies that invest a lot in AI expect to get three times more money back over the next three years compared to companies that don’t invest much.

While companies are spending more on AI, they are also trying to save money in other areas. They are doing this by using fewer vendors for things like storage and servers.

Companies that use AI a lot see more value in it and expect to benefit from it in the future. These companies are willing to spend more on AI, even if it means going over their budgets.

However, there are still some challenges with using AI. The biggest problem is that the technology is still new and underdeveloped. Other issues include risks with data and legal concerns.

Check the complete report, it was a very interesting read!

Azure Policy
Create, and manage Azure Cloud Policy with ease!

Pedro explains how to create and manage cloud policies in Azure. Something our engineering teams could consider. The process involves these main steps:

1. Identify key people to involve, like FinOps practitioners, engineers, product teams, and security.

2. Define the policies and their scope. Consider broad policies that cover many resources, or specifics based on your requirements.

3. Develop and implement the policy. Create documents explaining the changes and test plans.

4. Review and approve the policies after implementation.

5. Monitor compliance regularly using cloud tools and audits.

6. Review and update policies often to keep them relevant.

7. Remove outdated policies when needed, with approval.

The goals are to improve cost tracking, increase control over cloud resources, optimize usage, and meet regulatory requirements.

Success can be measured by policy compliance rates, fewer non-compliant resources, improved efficiency, and stakeholder satisfaction.

Start doing some policies and control your resources.

Consulting
FinOps Consulting Grows: Here’s the Opportunity

FinOps consulting is growing as more companies adopt cloud cost management practices. IT service providers are finding increased opportunities to help customers with FinOps as it expands beyond just cutting cloud costs. Key points:

• 58% of cloud decision-makers have established FinOps practices, with another 18% planning to do so soon

• Companies are applying FinOps principles more broadly across IT, not just for cloud resources

• Service providers help customers set up FinOps practices, develop governance rules, integrate with cloud strategies, and build cross-functional teams

• There’s a shift from just cutting costs to optimizing value and using metrics like unit cost to evaluate cloud investments

• Providers assist with selecting and implementing FinOps tools to track spending, manage budgets, and improve resource utilization

• Some providers offer their own FinOps tools and services, especially for midmarket companies that can’t afford dedicated internal teams

The expansion of FinOps beyond basic cost-cutting to broader IT management.

KPIs
Discover COIN KPI for better cloud spend optimization

COIN stands for Cost Optimization Index Number. It’s a tool used in FinOps to understand cloud spending better.

COIN helps companies:

1. Talk to their teams about costs

2. Set goals for saving money

3. Understand why some costs can’t be cut

4. See if they’re getting better at saving over time

Here’s how COIN works:

• It looks at how much money a company could save, compared to how much they spend in total.

• For example, if a company spends $1,000 and could save $250, their COIN score would be 0.75 or 75%.

• A lower score means there’s more room to save money.

To make COIN useful, you can set rules:

1. Each team should have a COIN score of 80% or higher

2. Teams with big budgets should try to save at least $5,000

3. Small teams that spend less than $1,000 don’t need to worry about COIN

4. If a team can’t save money for good reasons, that’s okay

COIN helps companies save money on cloud services without making things too hard for their teams.

Together with Turbo360
Cut Azure Costs by $1M: The FinOps Way

A leading energy infrastructure business that’s been on Azure for over 6 years, spending around $5 million a year, discovered $1 million in potential yearly savings using Turbo360.

Their case study revealed common pitfalls:

•  Oversized VMs: Downsizing instances saved $10k/month each

• Accumulated small inefficiencies: Numerous $100-$500 monthly savings across resources

• Underutilized reservations: Implementing Azure reservations yielded $700k in annual savings

🎖️ Mention of Honour
FinOps Mas Que Costes: Podcast Release

We’ve launched a Podcast! Together with Damian Munafo, we are in a missing to grow the Spanish Spanish-speaking community of FinOps.

Our goal is to bring the best guests, and we haven’t started badly. We’ve got an episode with Ariel Munafo, Co-Founder of the SpainClouds community, and also of EuropeClouds, and IsraelClouds, along with several Cloud Companies.

Let us know if you’d like to see an English-speaking version of a FinOps podcast from our end. Reply to this email with “FMQC” and we’ll know

🏆 Quick Wins

Announcements

Microsoft released updates for Cost Management in August 2024: New reservation options for Azure OpenAI. Improvements to Cost Analysis.New ways to reduce costs for Azure storage.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has made changes to its ElastiCache Reserved Nodes. Reserved Nodes give customers a discount compared to on-demand prices.

AT&T claims VMware offered it a 1,050 percent price rise. This case is dropping info every week, and it’s getting to some ridiculous points. Waiting to see the consequences of it.

Articles & Podcasts

Savings Recommendations: r/FinOps. Awesome discussion in our subreddit about how people are doing some savings. CUDOS, Cloud Custodian, and many more names were dropped. Feel free to still add to the discussion!

Anderson Oliveira drops a great article about the FinOps Accountability Chain and how all the groups involved in FinOps need to do their part. If any group doesn’t do their job well, it can cause problems for the whole company’s efforts to save money on cloud services.

A small town called Spruce Pine in North Carolina was hit hard by Hurricane Helene. This town is very important for making computer chips and solar panels. Spruce Pine has special, very pure quartz that is needed to make these things.

Hope none of you were affected, and looking forward to seeing the solution to this awful Hurricane for North Carolina.

Professional Spotlight
Ariel Munafo

Entrepreneurship Spirit in the Cloud

As some of you may know, we launched a Podcast for FinOps in Spanish together with Damian. In our first episode, we interviewed his brother Ariel! A very well-established cloud entrepreneur, whose objective is to help grow the communities around the world.

👩‍🏭 FinOps Job offers

Permanent links (i.e. FinOps Job site) and FinOps Job Offers online.

💬 FinOps Connect Community

Join the FinOps Connect Slack Channel and let’s grow the community!

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