Reducing client Cloud spend by 45% annually through CloudFinops
Our client, an SMB retail company, has gradually migrated its operation to the cloud. However, the transformation was held without any methodology or proper architectural pre-planning. As a result, the client faced an unproportionate cloud bill and minimal insight into the usage and spending on resources.
While their costs kept mounting, their VP Cloud Infrastructure involved Fiakomind’s Cloud COE to provide a cost-reduction solution.
Project Name: Cloud Cost Optimization
Client: SMB Retail Company
Project Commencement Date: July 2022
Project Completion Date: October 2022
Our Solution
Through excessive monitoring of Cloud costs and after interviewing several key officials in the company, Fiakomind’s has managed to map the main costs and identify multiple savings opportunities. Potential cost savings opportunities were identified on EC2 services, S3, NAT gateway, and AWS Premium Support.
Our proposed savings of 45% annually, based on short-term and long-term savings, generating some quick wins with sustainable cost optimization. Our offer included not only cost optimization solutions but an end-to-end service for the company:
- 24/7/365 help desk support.
- Establishing a personal dashboard for resource owners to track costs and create accountability.
- Weekly calls and update meetings.
- Monthly reporting on behalf of Fiakomind’s, presenting the periodic achievements to the client’s management, infrastructure, and finance teams, leading to greater shared responsibility on cloud cost management.
Our Challenges and Remedies
As we know, per our experience, expenditure identification is the easy part. The main challenge is implementing an effective cloud cost optimization, and this case was no different.
With multiple AWS accounts spread over 5+ business units, the optimization process was relatively long and complex. We did experience some quick-win savings, but it took some time to see actual results that impacted the entire operation. One of the main challenges was to build trust and generate fruitful cooperation with different business units, allowing for the smooth implementation of FinOps solutions.
Eventually, the primary cost savings resulted from numerous vital actions that had a direct impact:
- Purchasing reservations and doubling the number of machines that run on a reservation plan.
- Implementing dashboards to detect anomalies in spend spikes due to misconfiguration, database overuse, keeping old inactive resources, etc.
- Manual Right Sizing VMs to remove unnecessary paid-for-resources.
- Resource cleanup and data transfer, consolidating and upgrading tables and machines, and so reducing storage and operation costs.
Conclusion
Cloud operation without strategic cost optimization is undoubtedly leading to waste, potentially jeopardizing business growth plans. Therefore, a successful and comprehensive cost reduction project must be executed by FinOps specialists to ensure accurate planning and implementation.
In this case, the client approached Fiakominds to implement FinOps tools and mindset. Like many projects this helped our customer save significant money while growing and maintaining a sustainable and effective cloud strategy.
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