As a FinOps team, it’s easy and exciting to chase the big wins. Someone accidentally left a cluster running over the weekend? All hands on deck. A data scientist spun up a p4d.24xlarge and forgot about it? Emergency Slack channel. Everyone loves catching the burst pipe. But here’s the kicker: situations like this aren’t causing…
In 2023, cloud cost complexity kept increasing, and many new cloud cost management tools were launched. We also saw existing players launch new features and capabilities to help their customers reduce cloud costs, improve their cloud budget, and eliminate cloud waste. The cloud providers released new capabilities, AWS Cost Explorer released a whole set of new features…
When considering cost optimization for the cloud, an equation can be used to structure the problem. Each component of the formula can be refined and delegated to the appropriate roles. The formula is: Cloud Costs = Usage x Unit Price A few years ago, I spoke with a user who proposed the equation above for…
You can now show the cloud cost impact of feature requests to Product Managers and Owners directly in their workflow, before features are shipped to production. Overview Cloud costs are hard to understand due to the complex pricing models used by the cloud providers. If cloud pricing was easy to understand it would be easier…
In 2012, we built a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator for cloud. Companies could use our online calculator to design their desired cloud infrastructure, and our tool would calculate how much it would cost. Now in 2022, 10 years later, we want to kill all cloud cost calculators ☠️ Back in 2012, there were no pricing…
When it comes to cloud costs, the relationship between the engineers who are responsible for purchasing infrastructure and the team leads, managers and FinOps who are responsible for the cloud bills is broken. It turns out the closer you are to the code, the further you are from costs. Let’s look at an example product to…
In 2009 I started my PhD research to focus on the decisions that needed to be made for an organization to adopt public clouds. These included the benefits, the risks and the costs of using such systems. My aim was to create a set of vendor neutral tools that would assist decision makers during the…
Today, we are excited to release an integration between Infracost and Open Policy Agent (OPA), HashiCorp Sentinel and Conftest. This enables DevOps teams to set policies on cost estimates before resources are launched. Today, we are excited to release an integration between Infracost and Open Policy Agent (OPA), HashiCorp Sentinel and Conftest. This enables DevOps…
I sat down with David Julia, who is the Head of Engineering at Eagle.io to talk about cost attribution, why it matters, who should care and how Eagle.io achieves this. We worked through their use-case, their tech stack, the tools they use, what worked and what did not work, and ultimately how they have achieved cloud cost attribution….
“Shift left” has become a popular buzzword for both Software Engineering and DevOps. It means introducing processes earlier in the software development cycle. The “shift left” principle started with testing. In a traditional waterfall model testing is performed just before release. Shift left testing started it earlier by introducing practices such as Test-Driven Development (TDD)…
Over the last 10 years we’ve seen a lot of shadow IT with AWS being used as the infrastructure provider. The AWS bills were put on company credit cards and expensed. Individual business units could spin up the resources they needed and work in an incredibly agile manner. Unfortunately, for the enterprise as a whole…
Most cloud providers enable users to set budget alerts on their actual cloud spend. This is a critical safety net as usage-based resources could incur a lot of cost (e.g. data transfer). There is also another safety net that companies should set up, and that is catching significant cost changes to their infrastructure before going…