FinOps and Automation
? Erik Norman
CEO | FinOps Lead | Certified FinOps practitioner | TPM | ITAM Forum member | Cloud migration specialist
You wouldn’t optimize a resource for $50 annualized savings, right? The effort will probably cost you more than what you're saving. But hey, with automation you can, especially if you have plenty of resources. Also, automating your simple tasks
Automation vs. manual tasks
We all know, automation can save plenty of time and money, and it’s generally worth it whenever you have to deal with anything repetitive. Automating tasks can also be fun, like this guy who created scripts to automatically text his wife whenever he was working late. Do you have any other fun scripts to share? Please add a comment, I’d love to hear about them.
Automation for FinOps practitioners
Let’s see if we can identify the elephant in the room. All these tasks have an indirect impact on your cloud costs bar one. Yup: however useful and important these tasks are, only one will directly affect your bill. But should you really use some automation to also implement cost fixes? What are the pros and cons? If you ask ChatGPT, you will get a decent but very generic answer with enough food for thought. However, there were a couple of crucial aspects missing: one is a huge advantage, the others, well, aren’t. Let’s go on and dive deeper.
The BIG advantage of Automation in FinOps
As stated in The State of FinOps 2023, the biggest challenge of FinOps practitioners is how to get engineers to take action. I always say: “Sending recommendations is as effective as sending love letters. Only if the counterpart is already positively inclined, it will work.â€
Now, automation cannot tackle this problem directly. You will still need to work on changing company culture
Automation and risk
Automating your cost reports isn't risky, so we'll narrow the scope and focus on the risks of automatically implementing cost fixes.
领英推è
The automation will only be as good as its implementation and its input. If it is going to directly affect your cloud resources, then it better be good. Or should it be smart? Yes, you might add some AI to make it smarter, but you can also convince AI that 2 + 5 = 8 because your wife is always right. IMO, you should focus on making your automation safe
Think about right-sizing resources; you follow best practices, monitor performance metrics
Automation and IaC
I love IaC. You can specify your infrastructure in a template and then deploy it. Make some changes, deploy again. Wonderful. However, what is the correct approach when a cost optimization recommends some changes to the infrastructure? In my experience, IaC templates are created during development and rarely modified until the next big update. Cloud costs are dynamic and require dynamic handling
In my experience, a good solution is to tolerate a small amount of drift. Keep your engineers focused on more productive tasks, and update the templates when feasible. This allows you to maximize cost savings
Where to start, what should you automate first?
I know it’s tempting to look at Storage and Compute as the biggest cost factors, and try to reach for the biggest cost savings. However, that is risky. If you optimize too eagerly, your customers will experience service degradation or failure, and no cost optimization is worth losing customers. Check out this amazing talk on the subject.
Conclusion
I’m an advocate for automation, especially within the realm of FinOps. It reduces your workload, so you can do what you’re best at: analyzing complex data and delivering valuable insights. It also allows you to go after cost optimization opportunities at scale and make a significant dent in your cloud bill.
Cloud FinOps Leadership | Value Analysis | Work + Faith
1 å¹´? Erik Norman, this is really helpful. It's common for FinOps content on LinkedIn to be repetitive. I often agree with the content, but it does not provide any new insights or practices. This is different, and it will help our team communicate with stakeholder groups about automation. Thank you.
Nice article Erik, I am also a fan of finops automation ;)
CEO | FinOps Lead | Certified FinOps practitioner | TPM | ITAM Forum member | Cloud migration specialist
1 å¹´Fun fact: I just published this article mentioning the risks of optimizing cost too eagerly, and the LinkedIn website was down within seconds.