Cloud FinOps: how to optimize your cloud bill

Cloud FinOps: how to optimize your cloud bill Deploy • Hana Khelifa • 17/01/23 • 7 min read

Should early-stage startups focus on optimizing cloud spending or growth? I recently read an article on TechCrunch that said:

In early product or go-to-market stages, optimizing cloud spending should be the last thing on a founder’s mind besides utilizing as much cloud resource credits as possible —Shomik Ghosh, partner at Boldstart Venture But the issue isn’t as black and white as you would think.

There are other priorities when building a product before getting to cloud cost optimization. Leveraging in as many cloud credits as you can possible get may result in a rocky foundation for your whole enterprise: it can lead you to relying on beefy Instances that are way too large for your actual needs – because, why not? you have the credits and you’d rather have too much of it than too little –but once those credits run out, you are left with an enormous machine – in terms of resources – that’s probably going to be under-utilized.

Without proper planning, credits can become something of a drug – your product will need more and more over time without regard of the actual business requirements. Long-term optimization initiatives need to happen before they run out, so you don’t crave for them while in production.

Of course, hyper-focusing on optimization is a job in and of itself, one most early-stage startups can’t afford to spend time on. But there are best practices you can implement to build an efficient baseline and guidelines for your future growth. Just like your product, your infrastructure will evolve. And that evolution will require continuous optimization.

When it comes to product, startups constantly test, iterate, learn, get feedback, and improve–you should bring that same mentality to your infrastructure. When it comes to optimizing your monthly cloud bill, you can take action across your organization and leverage automation tools, Serverless, and your storage to help close costly loopholes.

1. Encourage collaborative behavior

The first step to optimize your bill is to be able to predict and fully understand that it, which boils down to three pillars:

Visibility

Control

Accountability

Multiple tools are available to enhance the visibility and governance of your infrastructure layers. But the real first factor is people. You won’t be able to implement a successful and optimized strategy without a commitment from yourself and your team that ensures visibility, accountability, and control over your infrastructure.

Consult with all the teams who utilize cloud resources to understand how they use your current cloud services, their needs, and their frustrations. Which resources or services are actually unused, unnecessary, or unloved?

Once you understand more about the current situation, consider how you can track idle resources. After all, you’ll need to understand what your team is currently using to prevent paying unnecessarily. Another couple of questions to consider: What’s the process when it comes time to shut down a resource? And can anyone spin out an Instance, or is it limited to your platform team?

Keep in mind, cloud optimization is an always-present, evolving effort, so you need all parties on-board with the culture of cost awareness.

Build collective patterns, techniques, and blueprints for effective deployment in your organization, and share that knowledge. Even the smallest changes can add up to a big win.

2. Get comfortable with your cost visibility tools

Once you understand your costs and, importantly, their origins, you can start putting controls in place to optimize spending. To help with this, we provide cost management tools to give you the visibility and insights you need to keep up.

Estimated Cost Calculator

Before finalizing your order on the console, a simulator displays the Estimated Cost Calculator. This appears whenever you create a resource, and shows you how much the resource will cost over a set period of time.

Estimated Cost view

The Current Consumption Dashboard

The Current Consumption dashboard is the first thing you see when you log in to your Scaleway account . It helps monitor and correct anomalies. The dashboard shows your resources by product category (Compute, Network, Storage, etc.) so you can easily keep track of everything.

Current Consumption view

Billing alert

You can set up an alarm system to get notified as soon as your consumption exceeds a defined amount. You can opt to receive the alert by SMS, email or API webhook.

The budget is the limit of your expenses, in euros. The threshold is a percentage of this limit. Both are previously defined by you in the console.

For example, if you have defined a budget of 1000€, you can configure your billing alert so you receive an email notification once you have consumed 50% of this budget (limit). So in this case, you’ll receive an email once you consume 500€ of resources.

Billing Alerts view

3. Rightsize your compute resources

Rightsizing refers to the process of finding an optimal cloud configuration that maximizes your resources at the lowest cost. In other words, it is about finding unused or idle resources. Every cloud provider offers a large range of Instances suited for a variety of workloads.

The process of matching Instance sizes to your workload performance is challenging, and you may not get it right the first time–kind of like when you have to choose the proper Tupperware for leftovers. You’ll need your application up and running to really understand the real workload before you adjust. But don’t forget to do regular checks once in a while to ensure you aren’t leaving compute power idle because you’ve committed to oversized Instances.

One of the most effective ways to build an optimized infrastructure when it comes to cost and profitability is to proactively monitor your compute utilization, and rightsize it when needed. To make that as convenient as possible, start automating your provisioning as soon as you can.

Leveraging infrastructure-as-code to do so, with Terraform for example, is one of the principles of running efficiently on the cloud–and will help you to avoid unnecessary manual task (and errors).

4. Serverless makes pay-per-use possible

Serverless Functions

Serverless is a model in which the code is executed on-demand. That code can represent an entire application, but the most common use of Serverless Functions is to integrate…