What happened this week:
Cloud Q2 2024 Cloud Provider Update
Great articles about FinOps strategies and AWS tutorials
Mention of Honour to our dear Karpenter
Job Offers
Professional Spotlight with one of the best partners you can have in FinOps.
Amazing Quick Wins with a useful Reddit thread for beginner FinOps.
Today we are getting financial, and tagged. Good stuff. Brace yourself:
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Cloud Providers
Cloud Q2 2024: AWS leads, Google gains, Microsoft dips.
Cloud services are a big deal, reaching $79 billion in Q2 2024. Who’s in the lead? Great breakdown by Mark Haranas:
AWS Leads the Pack: AWS holds 32% of the market share. It remained steady compared to Q2 last year. AWS earned $26.3 billion, growing 19% year over year.
Microsoft’s Share Drops: Microsoft has 23% of the market. This is a drop from 25% last quarter. Still a giant, with $28.5 billion in revenues.
Google Cloud Grows: Google Cloud increased to 12% market share. Sales hit $10.3 billion, growing 29%. It’s bigger than the next four competitors combined.
Alibaba Holds Steady: Alibaba remains at 4% market share. Continues to be a major player in Asia.
Oracle and Salesforce Tie for Fifth: Each holds 3% of the market. Oracle recently surpassed IBM.
Others in the Game: IBM, Tencent, and Huawei hold 2% each. Companies like Snowflake and MongoDB show strong growth.
The cloud market is booming, and competition is fierce!
Cost Allocation
Develop a FinOps Strategy Beyond just Tagging
Starting with a strong foundation is key. Scott Corbett nailed it with a great article describing how to make a winning start on FinOps:
Develop a Cost Allocation strategy to help you make informed decisions. It should provide organizational context.
Consider writing and communicating your strategy. Clear communication helps align the team. Everyone should understand the strategy.
Tagging is useful but not the sole solution. It has pros and cons as can be seen in the comments of this post
Use Naming Conventions for account hierarchies. Naming helps allocate costs more effectively. Collaborate with account provisioning teams.
Leverage Third-Party tools wisely. These tools can help where tagging falls short. They assist in allocating costs accurately.
Start with a solid plan, then refine it as you go!
Cloud
AI reshapes the cloud; Capex soars for server upgrades
The AI boom is changing cloud infrastructure in big ways.
AI servers are a big focus now. They make up over half of server spending. However, they are just 19% of total server shipments.
Cloud companies are spending more money. Capital expenditure is growing a lot this year.
Some companies bring workloads back in-house. High cloud costs push them to use private IT to do “cloud repatriation.”
Trends point to smarter technology use. Companies are now trying to balance cloud and private infrastructure to become “cloud smart.”
AWS Tutorial
Automate AWS Resource Tagging for Cost Management
Understanding how to manage cloud resource costs can be hard, but AWS is here to help with better resource tagging. Here’s how AWS automates tagging through the AWS Service Catalog:
Consistent Tagging Made Easy: Tags help track resource costs. Automated tagging ensures tags are uniform across AWS accounts.
Using AWS Service Catalog: The catalog shares portfolios and manages tags easily. It simplifies tagging by linking tags to resources automatically.
Benefits of Tagging Automation: Reduces manual tag setup time. This ensures tags are added consistently and reliably.
Deploy Across Multiple Accounts: Tools distributed to many accounts ensure complete coverage. Central teams can manage tags from one place.
Adopting this AWS solution can save time and reduce errors. I wish they did it in Terraform 🙁
Mention of Honour Special
Deserved for recent discoveries that are inspiring for the FinOps community.
🎖️ Mention of Honour
Karpenter 1.0 Release
AWS has just announced the release of Karpenter 1.0.0.
Here’s a quick look at what’s new in Karpenter 1.0:
Disruption controls improved: Control disruptions by specific reasons like ‘Drifted’. Avoid disruptions during peak times for more stability.
Policy renaming for clarity: ‘WhenUnderutilized’ renamed to ‘WhenEmptyOrUnderutilized’. Reflects exact conditions for consolidating nodes.
Consistent consolidation settings: Consolidate after can now be used more flexibly. These settings are perfect for handling rapid demand changes.
TerminationGracePeriod introduced: Enforces a maximum node lifecycle with grace periods. This balances workload completion and node update needs.
Drift feature update: Drift is now stable and defaults to active. No more manual feature gate controls are needed.
AMI selector terms required: Users must specify AMIs in production. This helps manage auto-upgrades and testing effectively.
These updates promise to make your AKS cluster run with less, and save you some bucks 💰️
Jobs
👩🏭 FinOps Job offers
I’ll find both Permanent links (i.e. FinOps Job site) and Offers on the internet.
Professional Spotlight
Lee Wagner
A guy that helped me a lot building and growing FinOps Weekly. Lee is a well-known and experienced FinOps professional with a great toolset and MSPs available that can help you trim your costs.
And he’s a great guy. I am glad to have him as a partner on this.
Bonus
🏆️ Quick Wins
For those seeking more content, this section will provide additional resources.
Announcements
Telefónica Tech offers Apptio Cloudability as MSP
AWS Announcing general availability of EC2 G6e instances
HPE To Acquire Morpheus Data To Expand Hybrid Cloud Capabilities
Events
Join August FinOps Summit: FinOps X Recap, FOCUS, and FinOps & AI
Articles
Save on DynamoDB: 5 cost-effective strategies
FinOps Can Turn IT Cost Centers Into a Value Driver
Navigate FinOps pitfalls: Align external teams wisely
Great Reddit Thread on how to perform in a new FinOps Position
12 tips for optimizing AWS Lambda cost savings
Podcasts
Costly cloud egress: Mistakes and solutions shared by Cloud Masters
Feedback
🗳️ Poll of the Week
That’s all for this week. See you next Sunday!
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