What stands for IOIT in Cloud Costs Hygiene?

In big organizations, Cloud Costs are a big and multidimensional problem, and Cloudchipr is a single go-to platform focusing on both cost attribution/visualization and automation workflows. When tackling the complex issue of multi-cloud costs, we divided it into four critical phases: identification, Optimization, Integration, and Transformation, which we refer to as IOIT.

I - Identify all cost-saving opportunities.

O - Optimize using FinOps best practices.

I - Integrate Organizational Cost Hygiene.

T - Transform Cloud Operations into Automation Workflows.

Let’s dive deeper into each of those and see what would be the strategic and sustainable approach.

Phase I: Identify All Cost-Saving Opportunities

The first step is to conduct a comprehensive audit of your current cloud usage and resources. This involves underutilized resources, such as oversized instances and idle services, reservations coverage and utilization, attributing the costs to the right team and people and building visual dashboards to make the I - identification process ongoing. 

Phase II: Optimize Using FinOps Best Practices

When we have a clear understanding of where savings can be made, the next phase involves implementing FinOps principles to optimize cloud costs. FinOps, a portmanteau of "Finance" and "DevOps," promotes a cultural shift that bridges the gap between financial goals and cloud operations. So this is where the action items identified during the 1st steps get executed to run the first Optimization initiative. At this stage, companies can save 30%-60% of their costs. However, it is only halfway there as we need to ensure that this one-time initiative becomes a process that everyone follows.

Phase III: Integrate Organizational Cost Hygiene

Cost optimization is not a finance problem; it's an engineering problem. So in the Integration phase, we need to coordinate the right cost hygiene policy across the teams. Remember policy is nothing without enforcement, but we’ll talk about automated enforcement in the 4th step. 

So in the first place, the cost hygiene should be a contract between the teams on how the cloud resources should be used and attributed. There are many examples of this, some of which are shutting down dev databases and instances during night hours and weekends, tagging all resources with the right team, having a Tag/Label EXPIRATION: 24h on all R&D resources, stopping all ML dev instances which are not used for the last 12 hours and many more.

Overall what we call hygiene can differ from organization to organization, however, it’s important to have this agreement written on the wall and agreed between all parties, so that we can automate the enforcement with workflows. 

Phase IV: Transform FinOps into Automation Workflows

Automating the enforcement of agreed tagging and resource utilization policies is a breeze with Cloudchipr. You can create flexible workflows based on specific conditions and actions with just a few clicks. This allows you to receive notifications when underutilized resources are identified, or even deactivate unused development resources. One example of a workflow utilized by our customers is daily checks of Dev and R&D accounts for unattached EBS volumes, IP addresses, and Load Balancers, with the option to clean up if any issues are found. You can also run notification workflows which will check for resources without an Owner and Team tag and send notifications to the corresponding slack channels or email groups. So the automation workflows are super flexible way to automate the Cost Hygiene Policy defined in the 3rd step of our 4 stage framework. 

Summary

Managing cloud costs is an ongoing and complex process, even for experienced engineers. Applying the principles of Identify, Optimize, Integrate, and Transform (IOIT) can be challenging. Cloudchipr offers a solution that automates and simplifies the whole process breaking down everything into 1 day of work. 

It’s free to try, Sign Up a connect your cloud accounts in 3 minutes at https://app.cloudchipr.com

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