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Culture
How to Build a FinOps Culture

FinOps culture helps organizations manage cloud costs better. Without it, companies waste money and miss chances to save. FinOps means everyone in a company works together to control cloud spending. This includes engineers, finance teams, and managers. Key parts of building a FinOps culture:

1. Create a team with people from different departments

2. Share information openly about costs

3. Give teams tools to see and control their spending

4. Make cost management part of the development process

5. Keep improving based on feedback

To get people excited about FinOps, make it easy for developers to see and control costs, create ways for teams to share ideas, and reward people who save money.

Some problems you might face could be:

• People do not want to change

• Teams not working together

• Lack of skills to manage costs

To see if your FinOps culture is working, track things like how much money you're saving and how many teams are using the cost tools provided. Building a FinOps culture takes time, but it can help your company use cloud services more wisely and save money.

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In partnership with Cloud Cost Control
Optimize Your Cloud Costs with Tailored FinOps Training

Having a skilled FinOps team is crucial for managing and optimizing cloud costs. We offer tailored training programs to meet your organization's needs, ensuring your team gains the skills necessary to maximize efficiency and control cloud expenses.

• Fundamentals of Cloud FinOps: Core principles for efficient cloud spending management.

• Advanced Cost Optimization Techniques: Identify and eliminate unnecessary expenses.

• Creating a Financial Management Program: Establish a FinOps program and foster a culture of financial efficiency.

• Certification Exam Preparation: Prepare your team for FinOps certifications.

AWS Cost Optimization
Optimize AWS Config Costs: Strategies and Insights

AWS Config is a service that tracks changes in your AWS resources. While useful, it can become expensive if you have many resources changing frequently. The article explains how to analyze AWS Config costs:

1. Look at the number of configuration items recorded in the AWS Config Dashboard or CloudWatch Metrics.

2. Use AWS Athena to query the Config data stored in S3. You can create tables for different time periods:

   1. Single day snapshots

   2. Specific months

   3. All historical data

   4. Custom date ranges

3. Run queries to find:

   1. Total number of records

   2. Resource types with the most changes

   3. Specific resources with high change frequencies

This analysis helps identify what's driving your Config costs. You can then exclude certain resource types from being recorded, adjust data retention periods, or investigate unusual spikes in activity. By optimizing what you track, you can balance thorough monitoring with cost-effective management of your AWS infrastructure.

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Big Companies
Akamai slashes cloud costs by 40% with Project Cirrus

Kate Prouty, Akamai's CIO, said they were using lots of cloud services but not keeping track of the spending. This happened as Akamai bought other companies that used the cloud and their engineers started using more cloud tools. To fix this, Akamai started a project called Cirrus:

• They looked at which cloud services they were using and why

• They moved some work to their own systems instead of the public cloud

• They trained engineers to be more careful about cloud costs

• They built new tools to track cloud usage and expenses

This helped Akamai cut cloud costs by 40% in the first year. Prouty said many other companies are facing similar issues with rising cloud bills. The key is to carefully review how the cloud is being used and make smart choices about where to run different workloads.

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AWS
👨‍💻 Optimize AWS Lambda with this OpenSource Tool

AWS Lambda Power Tuning is an open-source tool that helps optimize Lambda functions for cost and performance. The tool uses AWS Step Functions to create a state machine. This machine tests your Lambda function with different memory settings, from 128MB to 10GB. Here's how it works:

1. You provide a Lambda function ARN as input.

2. The state machine runs your function with various power configurations.

3. It analyzes the execution logs and suggests the best power setting to minimize cost or maximize performance.

4. The tool generates a visual graph showing the average cost and speed for each power configuration.

You can deploy AWS Lambda Power Tuning using different methods, including the AWS SAM CLI. After deployment, you can run the state machine manually or with scripts.

The tool's output includes the optimal power configuration, average cost, and duration. It also provides a URL to visualize the results. AWS Lambda Power Tuning is free to use and runs in your own AWS account. It supports cross-region invocations and parallel execution for faster results.

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👷‍♂️ FinOps Job Offer

Build the next FinOps product with The Duckbill Group

The Duckbill Group is throwing our hat into the ring by building a new FinOps product and we're looking for another engineer for the team. The role is on-site in San Francisco (we'll help with relocation!).

Come help us build something amazing.

AWS
Optimize your Container Workloads for Sustainability

Building containers with less storage and computing resources can make your software more environmentally friendly. This doesn't mean removing features. Instead, you can:

• Choose smaller base images for your containers. A full Python image is 352MB. A slim version is only 48MB. An Alpine version is under 19MB.

• Remove old container versions you don't need anymore. Use Amazon ECR lifecycle policies to automatically delete old images.

• Build containers more efficiently. Use AWS CodeBuild. It only runs when needed, unlike always-on-build servers.

When running containers:

• Pick the right size Amazon EC2 instances and use AWS Fargate to match resources exactly to what containers need.

• Try using EC2 Spot Instances for workloads that can handle interruptions and set up auto-scaling to run only the containers you need. Also, consider AWS Lambda for event-driven tasks.

By following these tips, you can reduce your environmental impact and often save money too.

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Events
[Webinar] Shadow Waste Uncovered: Cutting Hidden Costs in the Cloud

Join us to learn how to identify, and cut those hidden costs in your cloud environment.

ℹ️ Format

• Date: 30th of January, 2025

• Type: Online Webinar

• Starting at: 6:30 PM

⏰ Agenda

• 6:30 – 6:45 Community Session with Erik Norma

• 6:45 – 7:15 Main Session - Shadow Waste Uncovered: Cutting Hidden costs in the cloud with Aviv Revach (CEO, Adaptive6)

• 7:15 - 7:30 Q&A

☁️ Let's find the hidden cost drivers in your cloud environment!

🎖️ Mention of Honour
FinOps merges Data-Driven Insights with Storytelling

FinOps is more than just tools and numbers. It's about teamwork and changing how people think. The secret to success in FinOps could be storytelling.

Stories have been important to humans for thousands of years. They help us learn and work together. When we combine stories with special communication methods, they become even more powerful. Here are some tips for using stories in FinOps:

1. Think about what your audience cares about

2. Know what you want to achieve with your story

3. Use simple examples to explain hard ideas

4. Share ideas that can grow over time

5. Turn problems into chances to do better

6. Keep telling your story in different ways

Stijn learned these skills from being an architect and salesperson. He then studied a special way of talking called NLP. This helped him become better at explaining things and working with people.

One of the most important skills in FinOps isn't about numbers or finding problems. It's about talking to people. Learning how to tell good stories can make you better at your job and help your whole team work better together. A good story can start big changes.

Read the complete article here

🏆 Quick Wins

Announcements

AWS Compute Optimizer now offers new features for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has released new and updated resources for their CFM (Cloud Financial Management) Tips program.

Top CIO trends: AI, FinOps, digital literacy, governance.

Articles & Podcasts

Shifting FinOps Left: The Deployment phase (Link)

Datadog vs Grafana Pricing Comparison (Link)

Professional Spotlight
Yuriy Prykhodko

The Master of Cost Intelligence Dashboards

He probably needs no presentation. Along with his team, Yuriy is doing a great job with CID and CUDOS dashboards that most AWS FinOPs (especially my partner Damian) love. His passion for this project is amazing!

Check the Professional of this Week

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