FinOps tools in the Cloud: An insufficient first line of defense

 

FinOps tools in the Cloud:    An insufficient first line of defense Once seen as an economic El Dorado, the Cloud is now a source of anxiety for companies faced with exploding costs. Flexera's famous annual " State of the Cloud " survey, based on 753 IT decision-makers in different types of companies, shows that Cloud spending appears to be the number one concern. This is quite legitimate when you consider that the Cloud market will reach $1.2 trillion by 2028 ( Grand View Research ). Some studies indicate that almost 50% of Cloud spending is a complete waste!    FinOps tools have emerged as a relevant response to this problem. For example, 49% of respondents to Flexera's survey say they have adopted a FinOps solution to analyze and optimize cloud spending. Optimization is primarily based on rationalizing cloud infrastructures and measurement.  We believe that it is possible to go much further to  solve this perpetual drift in a sustainable way.   The role of FinOps  tools in management Cloud costs   Faced with the uncontrolled rise in cloud bills, companies are adopting cost management tools to monitor their expenses. The solutions offered by hyperscalers are Azure Cost Management, Google Cloud Cost Management and AWS Cloud Financial Management. They allow you to monitor the evolution of costs and send alerts before they become excessive.   Except that 89% of respondents to Flexera's survey are multi-cloud, which limits the scope of these solutions, unless you juggle between several tools continuously, which is not necessarily simple.  And then, there is a feeling that these hyperscalers are both judge and jury for having set up billing systems perceived as opaque!   Third-party tools for multi-cloud businesses provide a consolidated and more detailed view of cloud spending. Examples include Datadog and Apptio Cloudability. These tools help identify unnecessary spending related to oversized infrastructure and unused or underutilized services. We can also mention Turbonomic which automates the starting and stopping of applications according to demand, or Densify which dynamically adjusts the size of Kubernetes clusters and VMware instances. Why are these FinOps solutions insufficient?   Just tracking expenses or optimizing infrastructure sizing without addressing the root causes of expense inflation is like putting a band-aid on a wooden leg! FinOps tools are a good first line of defense for controlling cloud costs. However, they must be accompanied by an ambition for continuous optimization of the information stored, often wrongly, for many excellent reasons!   This is what we offer with {openAudit} .   Uses   and  traceability  to isolate unnecessary flows and sustainably reduce costs  ! Identify unused data through dynamic log analysis.    Log analysis by {openAudit}  allows you to continuously identify data that is not consulted or used over a given period. Identify the upstream “branches” of this unused data, with technical data lineage.   {openAudit} identifies the sources and transformations that generate unused data using technical and multi-technological data lineage, up to a hypothetical branch that will be the source of a useful flow. Attach these "branches" to cost logs   {openAudit}  will associate the identified processes with the cost logs exposed by the hyperscalers, to assess their financial impact. This will also make it possible to prioritize optimization actions by targeting the most expensive flows. Storage and compute have the highest associated costs in billing. Measuring the evolution   Setting up a dashboard to monitor cost developments will help to effectively motivate the team responsible for the subject. Furthermore, simplifying the cloud architecture by eliminating unnecessary flows not only reduces costs, but also reduces maintenance, simplifies migrations, etc. CONCLUSION   FinOps tools help track and measure the financial drift often associated with the Cloud. But this is not enough, and it will also be necessary to continually tackle information inflation to curb it and massively reduce storage and computing costs.  The traceability of information associated with its uses in a complex Cloud environment will not only reduce Cloud bills significantly, but also reduce maintenance and ensure that the infrastructure remains agile, scalable and efficient over time.