Hello and welcome back to our inaugural Cloud Cost Optimisation blog where we look to highlight some of the latest news happening in Cloud Costs.

1.   Blameless Culture: How to learn from failure constructively

Team collaboration and the drive for continuous improvement is key to FinOps, and one principle not credited enough in achieving this is blamelessness. While not a new term, or specific to FinOps, a blameless culture promotes learning by creating a safe environment for people to take risks in. This creates an opportunity for us to learn from mistakes and share knowledge gained.

The FinOps Podcast, released earlier this year and featuring an interview with the Executive Director of the FinOps Foundation and ex co-founder of GlobalLogic’s preferred cloud cost management tool Cloudability (JR Stormont), discusses this as a core Google Cloud Platform (GCP) principle – a principle the FinOps Foundation is considering adopting.

In establishing this blameless culture, GCP has suggested running ‘blameless post-mortems’ of serious cost issues to identify the cause (without passing blame to any individual or team) and resolution, the actions to be taken and lay out the lesson learned. They also encourage celebrating those who responded to errors made in a constructive way.

For further information and tools to guide you in cultivating a culture of blamelessness or to listen to The FinOps Podcast please see below:

https://cloud.google.com/architecture/framework/cost-optimization/finops#establish_a_blameless_culture

https://sre.google/sre-book/postmortem-culture/

https://sre.google/sre-book/example-postmortem/

https://podcasts.apple.com/in/podcast/the-finops-podcast-by-ternary/id1590896305

2.   Hybrid Cloud is the new norm

IBM and Oxford Economics joined efforts in a recent research project to assess digital transformation and cloud adoption. The outcomes of that research were published last month and show a shocking drop in single cloud strategy. From 16% in 2019 to 2% in 2021, single cloud architectures have become a true exception to multi-cloud deployments.

Why is that important from a Cost Optimisation point of view? The answer is simple: mixing and matching services across vendors comes at the price of increased complexity in governance. More vendors mean risk of duplicated information, increasing networking costs and time-consuming compilation of costs.

There are multiple tools available for handling Cost Optimisation across vendors and we, at GlobalLogic, have the expertise to help you maximise the benefits of a hybrid cloud strategy.

If you want more information about the IBM report, follow this link: https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/K0ZGR6BW

3.   AWS launch Sustainability Pillar at Re-Invent

AWS has added an additional pillar to their Well-Architected Framework during Re-Invent 2021. The new Sustainability Pillar will focus on the environmental impacts of Cloud designs, especially around energy consumption and efficiency. It’s great to see the major Cloud operators starting to think about environmental impact and bringing this into focus for their customers as well. That now means two of the big cloud providers have launched a Sustainability aspect to their design, with GCP announcing its Carbon free cloud for customers last year – as covered in our previous blog.

This has a direct relationship with Cloud Cost Optimisation, and we hope that it will lead to more informed decisions around utilisation and efficiency when architecting new solutions which will lead to better management of Cloud costs.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/sustainability-pillar/sustainability-pillar.html

What next?

If you’re not sure where to start with your own Cost Optimisation journey, GlobalLogic can help.

Our FinOps certified Practitioners can walk you through the areas of where Cost Optimisation can be achieved – the low hanging fruit as well as the often-overlooked intricacies of rate card optimisation. This will give you a better understanding of the FinOps practices you need to benefit from in-year and year-on-year savings.

If you’d rather keep your team working on their projects, let us do the leg work for you.  Although data gathering and the subsequent analysis can be time consuming and detailed, the activity is worthwhile, yielding between 5 and 22% return in the form of cost recoveries and ongoing management of cost. A return that more than covers the cost for the outlay of the program.

With the help of our FinOps certified Practitioners we can integrate into your existing ecosystem and drive positive behaviours to realise cost efficiencies that will keep you ahead of your competition.

If this sounds of interest, reach out at: https://ecs.co.uk/contact-us/