FinOps Learning
Complete Learning Path for FinOps
FinOps Skills: Benjamin outlines the detective-like nature of FinOps, emphasizing the importance of gathering data, storytelling, and communication. It highlights four key areas of expertise: Cloud, FinOps, Tooling, and People skills.
Learning Resources: It provides a collection of online resources for learning about cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP), FinOps principles, and tooling, including links to courses and labs.
Community Involvement: The importance of community-driven knowledge in FinOps is stressed, with recommendations for reading materials, newsletters, and podcasts to stay informed and engaged.
People Skills: They will ensure that FinOps work does not remain in isolation but contributes to achieving business goals.
This article serves as a guide for those looking to develop a career in FinOps, offering advice and resources to enhance their learning journey.
AWS
CUDOS v5.4 Release
CUDOS v5.4 Release: The latest version focuses on enhancing cost and usage visibility for security services, crucial for both FinOps and security management. It introduces a new Security tab for centralized cost tracking and future cost projections, especially for Amazon Cognito M2M authorization usage.
Shared by Yuriy Prykhodko
AWS
Introducing EC2 High Memory U7i Instances
High Memory Capacity: AWS introduces EC2 High Memory U7i instances with up to 32TiB of DDR5 memory and 896 vCPUs, powered by 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors
Enhanced Performance: These instances offer more than 135% compute performance and up to 45% better price performance compared to previous U-1 instances.
Ideal for Large Workloads: Perfect for running large in-memory databases like SAP HANA, Oracle, SQL Server, and compute-intensive tasks such as large language models.
Availability & Certification: Available in select AWS Regions and certified by SAP for various production environments.
Interviews
Amtrak’s Kathy Jenkins on building governance into cloud procurement
In an insightful interview at AWS Innovate Day, Kathy Jenkins, Amtrak’s Director of FinOps and Governance for Cloud Solutions shared how cloud-based collaboration tools are driving innovation at Amtrak.
Enhanced Cost Management: Jenkins explained that Amtrak uses advanced tools to provide real-time visibility into the costs of their cloud infrastructure.
Governance Structure: Amtrak has implemented a stringent governance framework for cloud procurement. This includes a multi-stage review process involving solutions architects, DT department representatives, and specialized teams from cloud services, analytics, and cybersecurity.
Podcast
Deciphering Cloud Costs with Tracy Woo at Forrester
The latest episode of the “What It Means” podcast features Principal Analyst Tracy Woo discussing the challenges of cloud cost management.
Woo highlights the FinOps Foundation’s efforts to standardize cloud billing through the FinOps Cost & Usage Specification (FOCUS), aiming to simplify and clarify billing statements for better cost control. The episode also touches on sustainability in cloud computing and the varying support from cloud providers for the FOCUS standard.
Guides
51 ways to save on AWS S3
Nir Peleg, a FinOps Engineer Team Lead, shares 51 strategies to reduce AWS S3 cost. Key takeaways:
Smart Storage Selection: Choose the most appropriate S3 storage class based on data access frequency and resilience requirements.
Lifecycle Management: Implement policies to transition or delete data, optimizing storage costs over time.
Data Transfer Efficiency: Minimize costs by managing data transfer and retrieval strategically, using tools like S3 Select and multipart uploads.
Data Management: Regularly review and clean up S3 buckets, employ data deduplication, and use AWS tools for monitoring and automation.
Nir emphasizes the importance of understanding usage patterns and leveraging AWS services to maintain cost-effective storage solutions. The full post offers a comprehensive list of cost-saving measures for S3 users.
Success Stories
How We Saved 36% on S3 Storage Costs
Avi Kenian detailed a success story about reducing the S3 bill:
Request Costs Surged: Despite low activity, S3 request costs were high due to 11 million daily LIST operations.
Investigation and Action: CloudTrail logs identified unnecessary daily tasks as the culprit. Stopping these tasks led to a 36% reduction in S3 costs
Intelligent Tiering: Implementing a lifecycle rule for Intelligent Tiering promises further savings by automatically moving objects to the most cost-effective storage class.
FinOps & DevOps
How To Apply FinOps Principles To Platform Engineering
Kyle Campos provides an in-depth analysis of the transformative impact of platform engineering and the critical role of FinOps in managing Kubernetes costs effectively:
Adoption of Platform Engineering: Gartner forecasts that by 2026, 80% of large software organizations will have internal platform teams providing reusable services for application delivery.
Kubernetes Cost Challenges: Despite Kubernetes’ widespread adoption for app deployment, many enterprises struggle with cost management, often due to inadequate monitoring and resource over-allocation.
FinOps Strategies: Integrating FinOps principles into platform engineering can streamline operations and optimize costs, with a focus on automation, tagging standards, and continuous optimization.
FinOps & DevOps
The GenAI Era in FinOps
A great article by Matan Ben-Ishay, with the following key points:
Architecture as a Service: AI is revolutionizing infrastructure design,.
Proactive Anomaly Detection: AI’s predictive capabilities are transforming anomaly detection.
Enhanced Forecasting Accuracy: With AI, forecasting becomes more granular and accurate, considering even seemingly unrelated external factors.
Automated Optimization: AI addresses small, often ignored optimization opportunities.
🎖️ Mention of Honour
Deserved for recent discoveries that are core for the FinOps community.
Why I just declined a job offer from a billionaire friend
This inspiring story by Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu about the Solopreneur path and running a project on your own made my week. A great read for Sunday to think through.
That’s all for this week. See you Sunday!
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