Cloud FinOps

“The cloud is the new Mainframe”

FinOps Principals

When optimizing your cloud deployments for financial efficiency you can leverage tools the cloud provider has offered up to assist with forecasting your costs.

For example we can watch the AWS Cost Explorer to manage our on-demand, reserved and spot cost — however, optimum financial operations (finops) requires a detailed knowledge of your traffic load (sporadic, sustained, time sensitive) and your distribution of static and autoscaled resources.

Favour Autoscaling to follow the demand curve very closely

The goal of efficient usage of resources is to pool ram/hd/ram/network resources into a single cluster. A set of services can then follow very closely the demand curve by using a core set of reserved capacity with the rest on auto scaled or spot capacity. Using spot has its disadvantages — the 2 min warning and cost fluctuations that must be pre-planned for when demand spikes the spot price.

Serverless is the new Mainframe

Functional event driven frameworks that split out the execution engine as scalable serverless functional units where we are fully abstracted from the infrastructure are the most cost effective to a point — depending on your…