Cloud technologies have unleashed innovation across industries. But there‘s a beast that lurks within—Runaway cloud costs. Managing cloud expenses needs to become a core business competency in order to control the beast and avoid unexpected budget shocks. This field guide arms technical leaders with practical strategies, real-world insights, and battle-tested tools to slay cloud waste.
The FinOps Revolution
Financial Operations, or FinOps has emerged as a new cloud financial management discipline. Instead of passively getting billed…
Danger Signs of Cloud Overspending
Industry research indicates that upwards of 35% of companies exceed their cloud budgets mainly due to low visibility into usage and spending patterns across distributed teams….
When Azure Bites Your Budget
In Azure, some of the common culprits for cost overruns are:
- Overprovisioned Virtual Machines: Paying for unused compute capacities
- Overpowered Database Services: Choosing pricing tier incapable of workload demands
- Bloated Storage Footprint: GBs of data no longer accessed or required
- Zombie Assets: Keeping decommissioned resources running
Proactively avoiding these pitfalls requires a change in mindset and practices towards constant oversight…
Right-Size VMs to Workload Needs
For example, switching from a memory optimized Standard_DS2_v2 VM to a more balanced Standard_E2s_v3 VM reduces the cost by 30% while still meeting typical workload requirements…
Match Storage Access Patterns to Optimal Tier
Hot storage delivers higher throughput and lower access latency but carries a premium price tag. Cool storage serves infrequent access data at lower per-GB charges…
Top 5 Capabilities Needed in FinOps Tools
- Granular cost allocation and chargeback reporting by departments, environments or labeled dimensions
- What-if modeling to forecast impact of scaling resource usage
- Actionable recommendations on optimizing overprovisioned or underutilized assets
- Anomaly detection to flag sudden or unexpected spikes in daily/monthly spends
- Reservations management and coverage visibility
A CxO‘s Guide to Optimizing Cloud Spend
"We‘ve managed to optimize our Azure expenditure by over 40% over the last year by instituting FinOps disciplines." —Damien Wong, Director of Cloud FinOps, Contoso Corp
Key takeaways from Contoso‘s FinOps journey:
- Achieved consolidated visibility into spends across business units with advanced analytics
- Automated policy enforcement blocks provisioning oversized VMs
- Storage autoscaling tiers data to access patterns saving 58%
- Reserved Instances covered majority of production workloads
"Continuous cost optimization needs to…
A 10 Step Program to Overcome Cloud Overspending
Follow this step-by-step guide to orchestrate an Azure cost optimization play:
- Set up cloud financial management team ….
- Analyze historical usage and billing data…
- Label resources with tags and implement chargeback…
Take Control of Your Azure Cloud Journey
With great power comes great responsibility. Azure provides immense scale and flexibility to power innovation, but only with financial oversight…
