Preface

Enterprises’ usage of the cloud doesn’t appear to be slowing down. In fact, it seems to only be accelerating. The growth of the cloud has enterprises seeking demand for cloud skills in not only the use of its technology, but in its operations as well. Many enterprises understand that the cloud offers benefits such as the ability to test and develop software quickly, the ability to innovate by offloading the undifferentiated heavy lifting to a cloud provider, and the ability to reach customers globally to essentially expand into new markets.

One benefit of the cloud that enterprises are often enticed by is its cost savings. However, some shake their head at this so-called benefit, arguing that it’s more costly to operate in the cloud. At first glance, this might be true if you look at a cost comparison from a certain perspective. But when you’re able to tell the whole story in the context of an enterprise’s business goals, then there’s a lot more to unpack. This book will help you do just that. It will unpack both the tactical ways to optimize on cloud costs, and the strategic approaches that ensure your business is leveraging the full value of the cloud.

This book’s focus will be cost optimization in AWS. Although you can adopt some high-level strategies for any public cloud provider, the tactical aspects will be centered on AWS.

Who this book is for

Business, technology, and finance leads will inevitably become involved with FinOps in some way, shape, or form. A thoughtful software architect aims to learn as much of the business domain as possible to ensure that the technology being built supports the goals of the business. Similarly, any person concerned with lowering the variable costs of cloud resources will benefit from the themes and concepts presented in this book.

C-level executives will benefit by learning how they can help shape lean cloud operations to lower costs for the aggregate business. Line-of-business leaders will benefit by learning techniques they can employ within their teams to ensure they are maximizing the value of the cloud.

Technologists can apply the practices within this book to architect their cloud workloads in the more optimal way. Developers can benefit by gaining an understanding of how their deployment decisions impact the bottom-line. However, DevOps and infrastructure engineers will benefit more, as the book will help uncover tactics to lower costs.

Those in financial planning and analysis will benefit by gaining knowledge behind the technology that drives the cloud. These people offer a different perspective from technologists. Observing cloud operations through a financial lens will help technologists see new and optimal ways to build on the cloud.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, FinOps Foundation, defines FinOps so that all readers have the same foundation as they progress through the rest of the book. You will understand the origin of FinOps, as well as its purpose. You will understand the definition of FinOps, the entities responsible, the importance of the discipline, and how to set the foundations for doing so. In other words, it explains the who, what, why, and how of running FinOps on AWS.

Chapter 2, Establishing the Right Account Structure, discusses strategies for organizing AWS accounts allowing you to use AWS Organization for consolidated billing, volume discounts, reserved instance sharing, and others. Everything in AWS starts with the AWS account: this includes cost optimization. You will understand the benefit of consolidated account management in terms of governance and resource management.

Chapter 3, Managing Inventory, teaches you to take an inventory of all your assets now that you have the right account structure in place. This chapter teaches you how to use AWS tools to take inventory, produce reports, and identify anomalies. It also provides guidance on different tagging strategies to have a sustainable inventory-tracking policy.

Chapter 4, Planning and Metrics Tracking, teaches you to baseline your spend. You need this data in order to see where you can reduce waste, and find opportunities for optimization. This chapter teaches you how to use Cost Explorer to see your usage, create reports that can be tracked over time, and set up policies and goals to know how well you are performing to reduce waste.

Chapter 5, Governing Cost and Usage, emphasizes that with inventory, metrics, and baselining in place, you must now know how to govern your usage so that costs do not deviate from expected spend thresholds. You will learn how to use various AWS Management services such as AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, and AWS IAM to govern your account’s spend. You will also learn to tag their resources properly so that you can track resource use effectively.

Chapter 6, Optimizing Compute, covers compute, the most popular use case for customers. You will learn how to choose the right pricing model for your workload. These options are reserved instances, Savings Plans, Spot, SageMaker Savings Plans, and on-demand. You will learn to use AWS Compute Optimizer to rightsize their instances. You will also learn about serverless offerings to maximize efficiency.

Chapter 7, Optimizing Storage, examines another core component of IT: storage. You will learn how to optimize your storage use. You will learn the different storage tiers in S3 to optimize storage costs, including S3 Storage Lens. You will also learn how to optimize on the database services including Amazon RDS, Amazon OpenSearch, Amazon EFS, and DynamoDB.

Chapter 8, Optimizing Networking, discusses the last core IT component: networking. You will learn how to analyze and optimize on data transfer costs. You will also learn to use VPC endpoints to reduce bandwidth costs wherever appropriate for your workload. You will also learn the different hybrid networking architectures and learn how to conduct cost analyses to choose the optimal solution.

Chapter 9, Optimizing Cloud-Native Environments, covers optimization topics beyond compute, networking, and storage. You will learn how to use rightsizing and elasticity such as auto-scaling to maximize the efficiency of your AWS usage. You will learn different autoscaling policies and strategies, and learn which to use for a specific workload. You will also learn to use Trust Advisor to see other opportunities to optimize.

Chapter 10, Data-Driven Fin-Ops, explains that cost optimization is not a one-time activity. You must continually monitor, report, and act upon FinOps best practices at scale if you intend to maximize the benefits. This chapter shows ways to automate reporting and response to adopt a CI/CD practice toward FinOps.

Chapter 11, Driving FinOps Autonomously, goes through different ways individual teams can incorporate FinOps best practices in their daily operations. While the previous chapter focused on FinOps practices centrally, this chapter essentially teaches you about FinOps practices that also need to be managed de-centrally or autonomously. This provides you with the full spectrum of everything you can do to reduce waste from both the top-down and bottom-up perspectives.

Chapter 12, Management Functions, brings together the concepts of the previous chapters to teach you how to integrate both centralized and de-centralized FinOps practices. This will close the gap between all that you have read and bring everything together.

To get the most out of this book

You will need access to an AWS account if you would like to follow along in the exercises. Ensure that you have the proper Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions to access AWS resources. If you are a first-time user, you can sign up for free at aws.amazon.com.

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself. Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots and diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://packt.link/i2fRK.

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: “Mount the downloaded WebStorm-10*.dmg disk image file as another disk in your system.”

A block of code is set as follows:

model = sagemaker.estimator.Estimator(
container,
role,
train_instance_count=1,
train_instance_type='ml.m4.4xlarge,
input_mode='Pipe'…)

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

model = sagemaker.estimator.Estimator(
container,
role,
train_instance_count=1,
train_instance_type='ml.m4.4xlarge,
input_mode='Pipe'…)

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: “Select System info from the Administration panel.”

Tips, important notes, and use cases

Appear like this.

Get in touch

Feedback from our readers is always welcome.

General feedback: If you have questions about any aspect of this book, email us at [email protected] and mention the book title in the subject of your message.

Errata: Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you have found a mistake in this book, we would be grateful if you would report this to us. Please visit www.packtpub.com/support/errata and fill in the form.

Piracy: If you come across any illegal copies of our works in any form on the internet, we would be grateful if you would provide us with the location address or website name. Please contact us at [email protected] with a link to the material.

If you are interested in becoming an author: If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, please visit authors.packtpub.com.

Share Your Thoughts

Once you’ve read AWS FinOps Simplified, we’d love to hear your thoughts! Please click here to go straight to the Amazon review page for this book and share your feedback.

Your review is important to us and the tech community and will help us make sure we’re delivering excellent quality content.