FinOps is flavour of the day/month/year (delete as applicable) when it comes to optimising Public Cloud environments. The driver being reduction of cloud spend. And there's a lot of collateral available on this as well as a FinOps Foundation.

But Public Cloud is just an aspect of the picture.

The Flexera ‘State of the Cloud Report 2024’ shows that only 10% of businesses operate out of a single Public Cloud. Whereas 73% operate Hybrid Cloud (Public + Private Cloud), 14% operate multiple Public Clouds and the remaining 3% are fully Private Cloud.

Private Cloud – on-prem – can’t, then, be ignored and should factor into any Cloud Optimisation strategy and be an aspect of FinOps.

There is a tendency for Public Cloud to be viewed in its own bubble as if it’s the ‘be all and end all’. Yet, the use of a third party technology such as Pure Storage Cloud Block Store can drastically reduce cloud storage spend. Most FinOps practices don’t consider non Public Cloud solutions which will constrain the value that can be obtained out of such a practice. Which is kind of ironic as FinOps rightly promotes that ‘value’ should be the true consideration and not just ‘cost’.

So what does it take to optimise cloud environments?

It takes a Multi-Cloud approach that encompasses a client’s full application hosting environment – Public + Private Clouds – whilst assessing all available technologies and solutions.

Cloud Cost Optimisation primarily targets the following:

  • Right-sizing computing services for scalable solutions
  • Utilizing spot instances to optimize costs
  • Investing in reserved instances for long-term savings
  • Identifying and eliminating unused resources
  • Consolidating idle resources for better efficiency

But, again, this isn’t the full picture. Where can optimisations be achieved?

Pretty much everywhere:

  • Networking
  • Storage
  • Compute
  • Application Resources
  • Back Up
  • Security
  • Observability
  • Operations
  • Core Services – IaaS vs. PaaS vs. Serverless

All the above applied to each Cloud as well as across all Clouds, and then applied to each hosting environment therein such as Virtual, K8s or Bare Metal.

It’s a lot to consider but the outcomes can truly be beneficial and transformative: reducing cost whilst increasing performance, simplifying operations, reducing Mean Time to Resolution, accelerating Developer velocity, and achieving sustainability targets.
A FinOps practice is a great place for a business to start and to then expand to embrace the business’ entire technology estate.

 

Nigel Pyne

Principal Architect, Natilik

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