Automating infrastructure changes has become a huge trend. However, it appears many companies are missing opportunities to optimize cloud spends, especially when it comes to automation. Nearly half of the respondents (48.64%) in the State of FinOps Report 2021 have little or no automation in their cloud management.
Automation is being used in the following ways:
- Little to no automation: 48.64%
- Automate notifications of recommendations or alerting to teams: 31.21%
- Automate tagging hygiene: 28.48%
- Automate rightsizing: 12.73%
- Automate Savings Plans/RI/CUD management: 12.27%
- Automate Spot-pre-emptiple use: 8.48%
- Other: 5.15%
This blog will break down the above automation techniques that simplify FinOps efforts:
Usage & Cost Alerts
The most obvious use for automation is setting up alerts to notify your team when there are spikes in cloud usage or costs. An automated alert system gives you the awareness you need to resolve issues quickly. Depending on the tool, you can decide what you want to be notified about and how you want to be notified.
Amazon CloudWatch, for example, is a monitoring service built for DevOps engineers, developers, and IT managers to view data and respond to changes to your applications. The downside of CloudWatch is that setting up alarms requires some configuration based on either metrics or rule expressions.
Resource Tagging
Preventing cloud costs from spiraling out of control is a top priority for many businesses, so along with managing cloud costs is the need for resource and asset management. Implementing an effective tagging strategy is necessary to manage your cloud resources and to reduce certain risks.
Tagging is often used for cloud cost optimization purposes (by removing unused resources and reducing cloud costs) and it is also used to introduce accountability. While deploying and tagging resources can be done manually, it can become time consuming especially if you choose to tag all of your cloud resources, which is considered a best practice.
For AWS users, automation policies can help with auto-tagging, which aids in making sure all the required tags can be added to your cloud infrastructure. Automated tagging improves visibility into cloud assets and helps identify your most critical services such as IAM.
Rightsizing
Rightsizing is one of the most effective ways to control your cloud costs. It’s one of the fastest ways to optimize cloud infrastructure, performance, and cost-efficiency as it aims to match instance types and sizes with enough resources at the lowest possible costs.
Fortunately, this is where automation can also come in handy. Automation can help identify opportunities to eliminate and to upgrade or downsize instances where needed. Often times, instances (like containers, virtual machines, bare metal) can become over-provisioned or under-provisioned. The key is preventing resources from being incorrectly provisioned.
Now imagine being able to automate the process of identifying over-provisioned or under-provisioned instances and also the correct rightsizing. It would save tremendous amounts of time and also be more precise than manual work.
Automate Savings Plans/RI/CUD management
When evaluating long-term discounts for cloud services, it’s likely you’ve considered savings plans, reserved instances (RI), and committed use discounts (CUD).
All provide an opportunity to reduce cloud costs when you commit to a level of service for a predetermined period. Discounts typically depend on the length of the commitment or how much you pay upfront, as is the case for AWS.
However, discount programs are frequently changing and new ones are always popping up. For example, AWS Savings Plan was only recently introduced in November 2019. Cloud cost optimization tools that are keeping up with the trends can help automate the savings plans that are best suited for your organization by analyzing your current cloud setup.
Spot Pre-emptible Use
According to Google, a “preemptible VM” is an instance that you can create and run at a much lower price than normal instances and uses the cloud provider’s spare capacity.
AWS offers its own EC2 Spot Instances and Google offers Preemptible VM Instances; both offer significant discounts and competitive pricing. Spot Instances are available at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices, and Preemptible instances are up to 80% cheaper than regular instances.
Sometimes your organization may need to mix preemptible VMs with other instance types. For example, non-urgent actions used during a QA and staging phase can use preemptible instances to run whenever available, which can save costs. Working with automation will make the process of combining preemptible instances more efficient.
The Future of Automation
The outcome of cloud automation is efficiency and cost saving benefits to your business. It’s an ever growing field as new cloud players find creative ways to incorporate automation into cloud environments to save more on the cloud. There have also been strides in A.I. capabilities that make automation go even further in getting tasks done. Check out where A.I. is heading toward in
