Automation plays a crucial role in supporting Cloud FinOps and maximizing cloud cost-effectiveness using methods such as resource rightsizing, maid services, and more.

Did you know?

80% of organizations will overshoot their IaaS budgets due to lack of cost optimization approaches ...

Source: Cloud Cost Optimization 2.0 by CloudZero

Hence, 7 automations used in cloud management to support Cloud FinOps:

1. Resource Provisioning and Scaling

‍Automated provisioning of cloud resources and standardization of existing ones for optimal cost-effectiveness. Ex. Changing new and existing EBS Volumes from gp2 --> gp3 across an entire Organization for zero-downtime instant cost savings.

2. Cost Allocation and Tagging:

Tag resources at-scale against a source-of-truth, for example a CMDB. This makes it easier to track ownership, keep tag values up-to-date, and allocate costs to the corresponding owner for accurate financial reporting.‍

3. Usage Monitoring and Alerts:

Customized monitoring can track service and resource usage - automatically notifying, disabling, or terminating resources based on custom parameters specific to your business.

4. Rightsizing:

Identify and rightsize over-provisioned resources while providing an estimated cost impact. Our Rightsizer Systems recommend new hardware types and can rightsize an entire AWS environment at once with a few clicks - or put on a schedule to dynamically rightsize the environment.

5. Scheduled Start/Stop:

Automation enables the scheduling of resource start and stop times, ensuring that non-prod and non-critical resources are only active when needed, significantly reducing cost for services that bill hourly while resources are powered-on.

6. Policy Enforcement:

Guardrails to enforce rules and standards related to areas like resource provisioning, ensuring that teams adhere to mandatory tags, cost-saving guidelines, etc. Ex. Restricting EC2 instance types to AMD-based CPUs only for the best price-performance.‍

7. FinOps Dashboards:

Nexus dashboards offer a central view of data from multiple Systems, maximizing visibility into the KPIs you care about most. Automated reporting set up to represent your business targets and goals makes it a lot easier to get engineers to take action using supporting data.

In summary, automation in Cloud FinOps helps significantly reduce operational costs by optimizing resource usage, enforcing cost-saving policies, and giving data insights for clear decision making. When an enterprise cloud environment has millions of resources and cost-line items a month to track and optimize, the situation can seem overwhelming; rest assured, our automation engine can help launch your team into being a top-tier optimized cloud environment!