Fireside Chat: Automating Cloud Financial Management

In the discussion:  Mechanisms to recover and measure waste  Monitoring for tags and compliance  Ancillary services -  Support costs, VPC costs, security  Analytics for cloud  Showback and chargeback   Advantages from a cost and performance perspective  High tides and low tides  Large teams for RI management and financial engineering  Putting non-production workloads on spot  Building a map for discovery  Portfolio of good instances to mix to get highest savings  Rightsizing  Educating teams, maintaining performance levels  Modernization  Calculating and Transitioning 

In the discussion:  Savings Instruments - a brief history.  Savings Instruments as futures contracts sold on a commodity that is compute.  3. Getting full coverage with flexibility to transform.  Marketplace and enterprises.  Trading reservations as a solution?  Automated systems for purchase and trading.  What combination works for you? https://cloudwiry.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Cloudwiry-Podcast-Savings-Instruments-Table.png

In the discussion:  COVID - a world-wide accelerator for the industry. Basic yet powerful building blocks offered by the cloud to businesses. Businesses affected by COVID - higher accident rates in the airline industry due to loss of routine faced by pilots. The obvious rise of video streaming. Proactive shedding of resources by tech companies. Companies shifting from part-time CFM to full-time CFM. Cloud spend competes with the money that can be spent on innovation. Effects of under-forecasting and over-forecasting.

Quotes: "Most smaller companies have one person doing cloud financial management with spreadsheets - their efforts are divided between rate reduction (enterprise contracts, reserved instances) and cost avoidance (cloud parking, rightsizing)" "Engineers need to be motivated to execute on the recommendations. Gamify the process." "Everything that we do is serverless, we don't' have any rightsizing opportunity - This is non-sense." "Automation is key, it's always faster than people." "If you're not continuously innovating with the cloud provider on how to provide maximum value to the customer, you will become obsolete." "The point of FinOps is not to save every dollar, it is to get the most out of every dollar." "For databases, parameter configuration is more important than size." "For rightsizing, orphan databases are the best ones to go find and quickly eliminate."

Manual management of most processes is inefficient and hard to scale and sustain. When it comes to the management of cloud, large internal teams are needed to lead culture change and operationalize cost and savings awareness, which can be extremely expensive. Jason Kelly, Dieter Matzion, and Aditya Datta discuss ways to automate cloud financial management to free up capital and resources for your business.  Session moderated by Lauren Shimp.