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Alerts are the core of your monitoring systems along with observability. There’s nothing more action-oriented than a [ALERT] Message in your inbox on a Friday at 3 PM. Learn how to set some of those up in AWS today.
What also happened this week:
GCP continues to move in FinOps with Showback features
FinOps is Shifting Left for devs & products
Azure FinOps Best Practices Available
Mention of Honour: FinOps in SaaS
Job Offers
Professional Spotlight with the most underrated authors in FinOps
All 3 providers dropped stuff this week, I’m still crying and not from seeing the David from Michelangelo on my holidays. Although that was also extremely beautiful.
Action items: Read today’s newsletter, and then book a flight to Florence.
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AWS
12 Vital AWS Cost Alerts
Today we start with an actionable, right-to-the-point article. The best ones. AWS cost alerts are important tools to keep expenses under control. Chris provided a complete list with 12 helpful alerts you can set up right now:
Daily Spend Threshold Alert warns you if daily costs go over a set amount.
Monthly Spend Forecast Alert tells you if you’re on track to exceed your monthly budget.
Service-Specific Spend Alert monitors costs for individual AWS services like EC2 or RDS.
Unusually High Spend Alert detects sudden cost spikes that are out of the ordinary.
Unused Reserved Instances Alert lets you know if your reserved instances aren’t being used fully.
Unexpected Cost Change Alert compares current spending to past patterns to spot anomalies.
Cost Anomaly Detection Alert uses AWS tools to automatically find unusual spending.
EC2 Instance Size Change Alert notifies you if instances are upgraded to more expensive types.
Data Transfer Cost Alert tracks costs from moving data between AWS services or regions.
S3 Storage Growth Alert watches for rapid increases in data storage use.
Lambda Function Execution Cost Alert monitors serverless computing costs.
Elastic Load Balancer Cost Alert keeps an eye on expenses from load-balancing traffic.
I’d definitely suggest you translate them into your provider if you are not using AWS. Most of them are valid for other public clouds!
In partnership with FinOpsly
AI Copilot for FinOps
End-to-End FinOps.
Data at the speed of thought.
FinOps Empowered by AI.
FinOpsly’s AI-powered platform helps optimize your cloud cost and performance by understanding the unique complexities of your cloud infrastructure.
Multicloud visibility, optimization, and continuous improvement are all in the most intuitive enterprise product that you’ve ever used.
Adam from FinOpsly
GCP
Google Cloud steps into Showback with Attribution Solution
Google Cloud has introduced a new Cost Attribution Solution to help users manage their cloud expenses better. This solution uses labels to help you see exactly how much you’re spending on different parts of your cloud setup. The solution offers two ways to manage labels.
Proactive, where new resources are labeled correctly from the start. And reactive, where the tool helps you find and fix labeling issues on existing resources.
With these tools, you can answer questions like:
Which services cost the most?
How much does each team spend on cloud resources?
What’s the cost difference between testing and live environments?
To get started, visit the GitHub repository and read the documentation on best practices. You’ll find guides, examples, and tools to help you use the solution.
Shift Left
Shift Left FinOps to Prevent Costly Deployments
FinOps teams often focus on analyzing data after resources are deployed. This can lead to reactive cost management. Jeremy Nancel suggests a different approach: “shifting left” in FinOps. This means finding and fixing cost issues earlier in the development process.
This goes on the trend of shifting FinOps left, encouraging engineers & devs to handle costs in the design & development phases. We need to provide them with the tools and the information to make cost-efficient decisions, or otherwise, we’ll be overloading them
Why is this important? Finding problems early saves time and money. For example, catching an issue during planning takes 1 hour. Fixing the same problem after deployment could take 100 hours.
Nancel shares a real-world example: A team deployed an application that cost twice the expected amount. It took 6-9 months to bring costs down. One big problem: they couldn’t easily turn off non-production environments at night. They could have saved a lot of money and time if they had planned for this earlier.
FinOps Foundation
Cost-Aware Product Decisions
FinOps is changing how companies think about product costs. Instead of worrying about costs after a product is made, companies are now thinking about costs from the start. This new approach helps in three ways:
In the planning stage, it helps decide if a product is worth making. When building the product, it guides choices to keep costs low. After the product is launched, it makes it easier to keep track of and control costs.
By thinking about costs early, companies can make better products that don’t cost too much to run. This new way of working brings together different teams like business leaders, finance experts, product managers, and engineers. They all work together to make sure new products are both useful and cost-effective.
Together with Turbo360
Slicing Azure Costs by 30%: Document360’s Winning Strategy with Azure Reservations
Azure Reservations enabled Document360, a leading knowledge base platform, to save about 30% on costs. By reserving resources like Virtual Machines and App Service Plans, they optimized spending, which previously made up their Azure bills.
They also discovered even more savings by using Linux instead of Windows, which allowed them to cut costs while keeping their system efficient. Here’s what you should remember:
Align with Scale-Out Rule: Match reservations to your scaling needs.
Scaling Beyond Reservations: Extra resources incur regular charges.
Service-specific limitations: Review the terms and conditions for each service.
🎖️ Mention of Honour
FinOps in SaaS: What to Look For
SaaS has become very important for many businesses today. It’s easy for customers to use, but a lot is happening behind the scenes. The company running the SaaS has to manage servers, storage, and many other technical things. For SaaS companies, managing costs is crucial. This is where FinOps comes in. FinOps helps companies track and control their spending on cloud services.
To be successful, SaaS companies need to track important numbers like:
Monthly Recurring Revenue (how much money they make each month)
Churn rate (how many customers they lose)
Average Revenue Per User (how much each customer pays)
Customer Lifetime Value (how much a customer is worth over time)
SaaS companies need to track costs very closely. They need to know exactly how much each part of their service costs. This helps them catch problems quickly and make smart decisions.
Companies can use special tools to track their costs. These tools can be free (open-source) or paid. The choice depends on what the company needs. Without good cost management, SaaS companies can lose money without realizing it. That’s why FinOps is so important for these businesses.
Great article by Dinesh!
🏆 Quick Wins
Announcements
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has introduced a new feature for its Amazon EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations (ODCR). This new feature allows you to choose which account in your organization pays for unused capacity in shared reservations.
Google has made a deal to use small nuclear reactors to power its artificial intelligence (AI) data centers. The agreement with Kairos Power aims to start using the first reactor by 2030, with more coming online by 2035. This move is part of a trend of tech companies turning to nuclear energy to meet the growing power needs of AI systems. Data centers consume a lot of electricity to run and cool specialized AI hardware.
Microsoft has released a new version of its Azure FinOps toolkit. This update, version 0.6, adds several new features to help businesses manage their cloud costs better including a new library of best practices for FinOps, more detailed reports in Power BI, and many more.
FinOpsly, the AI-driven cloud financial management platform has announced its emergence from stealth mode following the closing of a $1.92 million pre-seed funding round. The funding was led by Hyde Park Ventures, with participation from Cintrifuse Capital, Narayan Surabhi, and other strategic investors.
Articles & Podcasts
Frank Contrepois and Stephen Old are celebrating the 4th anniversary of their podcast “What’s New in Cloud FinOps”.
New Episode of FinOps Más Que Costes with Ariel Tunik, on how to handle FinOps in a startup as a CTO
FinOps Feature Wishlist: r/FinOps People who work with cloud costs discuss what they want in new FinOps tools. These ideas show that people want tools that can do more than just show costs. They want tools to help them save money automatically and make smart pricing decisions.
🇪🇸 For the Spanish Speaking Audience
FinOps: Más Que Costes Podcast
Smart Clouds en Español Newsletter
Professional Spotlight
Alfonso San Miguel & Danny Obando
The FinOps Most Underrated Authors
Alfonso & Danny made the Efficient Cloud FinOps book, one of the most valuable resources for the FinOps Community. A must-read if you are into this field. And a couple of people to follow as well!
👩🏭 FinOps Job offers
That’s all for this week. See you next Sunday!
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