The adoption of the FinOps culture in an organization depends on several factors, among them the identification of best practices for the business.
This means that not everything can have adherence to every business. This does not mean that a good practice should not be considered, but rather that it may not be appropriate at a particular point in an operation.
The decision of this adherence must be based on the analyzes made by the Cloud Excellence Center, capable of identifying what will have effects on the cost governance issue, avoiding unnecessary expenses, either due to lack of strategic decision in the acquisition or incorrect adoption in the use.
When we look at the variables that can influence the decision of cloud cost management, we find several of them usually linked to business rules, such as, for example, scaling to meet a predicted demand.
However, some are directly linked to the operation and in fact require greater attention, allowing a good part of FinOps good practices to maintain control of expenses to be met. They are:
Practice 01
Validation of what is in use and disposal of the superfluous
One of the FinOps premises for good cost governance is to have control of what is in use and whether it is in fact important for the operation
Here are some features that need to be monitored to avoid unnecessary spending:
- Unattached virtual disks;
- Old Snapshots;
- Discontinued IP'S;
- Active zombies.
Always be aware that the production environment has exactly what is needed, discarding everything that is not needed.
Practice 02
Continuous update
The universe of cloud computing is dynamic and constantly evolving. This means that a technology adopted six months ago may have evolved and something different and better may be in place, requiring workloads to be adjusted for this new scenario.
The importance of this can mean better performance, optimizing both the acquisition and the use of computational resources, allowing the performance of an application to be at its best possible scenario.
I&O (Infrastructure & Operations) teams need to stay up to date and a good way to do this is to adopt, within a squad FinOps model, discussion group participation policies related to large cloud players so that they remain aligned with the frequent updates that arrive, often at a higher speed than expected.
Practice 03
Proper sizing
One of the great advantages of using public clouds is to be able to enjoy on-demand acquisition, allowing you to buy and return, according to your need (elasticity).
However, this may not always provide the best costs, hence the importance of being well sized, as your business demands.
The evaluation of the sizing of the environment is something dynamic, which is observed through analysis tools for this purpose, ensuring the implementation of Infra as Code (infrastructure as code) and that these will follow the rules defined by a CFM squad – Cloud Financial Management, or FinOps, observing the needs of the business.
This will guarantee that it will really be in use only here that de fato é necessário, eliminating waste and optimizing seasonal use.
Practice 04
Taking advantage of promotions
Squads FinOps have as a great differential to know how to take advantage of the promotions offered by cloud Computing players.
The options are diverse and change from supplier to supplier, allowing purchases to be made differently, according to the needs of use.
These options involve from direct negotiations of the available offers, defining acquisition deadlines, for example, even Lightning offers, available in specialized Market Places.
In this cloud universe, knowing how to buy is knowing how to take advantage of promotions.
Practice 05
Activar y desactivar entornos de forma dinámica
Known as dynamic Turn on and Turn off, these a ices allow workloads to be active only when needed, thus avoiding paying for a period of idleness, or that no Ox will impact or deal with, if turned off.
The adoption of observability techniques that take advantage of machine learning allows us to understand the usage behavior of applications and define what is actually in use and what can be turned off in certain periods, allowing significant cost reductions in the period of one year.
This analysis, using dashboards in specialized tools, will allow an optimal fine-tuning, where it turns on and off resources dynamically according to the observed statistical data, generating sensitive cost reductions.
See that, in a simple definition of five good practices adhering to the FinOps culture, we can adopt important behaviors so that cost governance is maintained in a cloud environment.v
These practices, defined jointly by the cloud environment management teams, organized in a cloud center of excellence, and aligned with the FinOps culture guidelines, will ensure that the best-case scenario for an environment consumes exactly the resources it needs, to the right extent, and on budget.
Adopt the FinOps culture in your organization and ensure that cost governance best practices are in place in your cloud operation.
PIER CLOUD- FinOps experts
As the FinOps practice is a culture developed by the FinOps Foundation, all phase credit reported in this model is, by right, hers, available at https://www.finops.org/ and they have been adapted for better understanding, faithfully following the concepts determined in their original publication.
