#224 – FinOps and Optimising Cloud Consumption

In this episode, Chris and Martin are in conversation with Aran Khanna, CEO and co-founder of Archera. The topic is cloud optimisation, also known as FinOps or Financial Operations. The public cloud introduces a transformation from capital to operational expenditure that, when combined with the frictionless ability to spin up any workload in minutes, can result in sprawl and excessive costs. Businesses heavily invested in the public cloud use FinOps and dedicated financial architects to optimise the use of public cloud resources. Archera provides tools to automate and improve the FinOps process.

This discussion is fascinating on many levels. While the most obvious direction for companies to take will be to reactively reduce waste from existing deployments, the long-term view will result in the development of tools and processes to dynamically optimise applications and produce recommendations before deployment takes place. We’re arguably a long way from that position, however Aran highlights how, with his brother’s financial background, the model already applied to financial instruments is rapidly being adopted by businesses and cloud brokers.

More information on Archera can be found at https://archera.ai/, or follow this link for a free demo offer.

• 00:00:00 – Intros
• 00:04:50 – What is FinOps – Financial Operations?
• 00:06:15 – Discovery is the first step for FinOps optimisation
• 00:08:20 – How are resources tagged to business units?
• 00:09:55 – Existing cloud usage can be very fragmented
• 00:11:45 – Dynamic environments could be hard to attribute to users
• 00:13:10 – Basic cost optimisation and refactoring are two main approaches
• 00:17:00 – Cost savings have to be balanced against the cost of recovery
• 00:18:30 – How do you quantify the cost/value of managed cloud services?
• 00:21:20 – Secondary markets exist to resell committed cloud resources
• 00:24:20 – Frictionless tech provisioning results in bad behaviour!
• 00:27:15 – Which areas can gain from the most optimisation?
• 00:29:35 – On-premises models for technology purchase have existed for decades
• 00:31:40 – Optimisation will be a fluid and constant process
• 00:34:00 – How do architectural design and coding skills need to change?
• 00:35:00 – Are code analysis tools good enough?
• 00:37:15 – We remember real physical pagers!
• 00:38:05 – Will cloud vendors adjust price structures in response to optimisation?
• 00:42:20 – Wrap Up

• #214 – Can CloudFlare R2 Disrupt AWS S3?
• #179 – The Myth of Cheap Cloud Storage
• Arm Architectures in the Public Cloud
• AWS, Cloud and Service Level Agreements
• Optimising Public Cloud Service Density

Copyright (c) 2016-2022 Unpacked Network. No reproduction or re-use without permission. Podcast episode #ft4t.