FinOps is the industry’s answer to cloud cost management. Cloud usage is spreading, and often one solution can depend on several public cloud providers. At times there are also on-premise components. So you as a cloud user have to look at both your cloud infrastructure, data usage and data transfer – Remember that public cloud providers charge you for transmitted data in specific directions.
References:
- What is FinOps (external resource, opens in a new window)
Tips and tricks, or a solid understanding?
There are numerous tips and tricks for cost optimizing specific AWS services. However, such detailed tricks are out of scope for this course, because here the focus i on on the AWS cost and management console. How to quickly assess which features you need, especially from the API Now, that being said, because AWS services for compute, storage, and machine learning change frequently, you should always map your specific AWS usage to the service costs that you incur.
Remember: According to the shared responsibility model, it is your responsibility to keep control over what you are spending on in AWS. Remember the AWS shared responsibility model that says the following:
“The customer assumes responsibility and management of the guest operating system (including updates and security patches) and any other associated application software, in addition to the configuration of the AWS-provided security group firewall.”
(from https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/aws-risk-and-compliance/shared-responsibility-model.html)
Also take note of the following paragraph:
“The AWS shared responsibility model applies to data protection in AWS Billing and Cost Management. As described in this model, AWS is responsible for protecting the global infrastructure that runs all of the AWS Cloud. You are responsible for maintaining control over your content that is hosted on this infrastructure.“
This has several implications and we are going to go over how this works in this section.
(from https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/data-protection.html)
Your first steps to becoming updated on your AWS spend
Before we continue, I highly suggest that you enable the following in the billing preferences (https://us-east-1.console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home#/preferences)
- Activate the invoice delivery by PDF to email.
- Secondly, activate the AWS Free Tier alerts to the root email address. This is an important consideration. The email address that you receive the invoice delivery PDFs to, may not be the same as the root email address, which you used to sign up to the AWS services.
- Thirdly, activate the CloudWatch billing alerts.