AWS re:Invent 2022 - FinOps: The powerful ability of insight to accelerate AWS (PRT035)

Aug 16, 2023

AWS re:Invent 2022 - FinOps: The powerful ability of insight to accelerate AWS (PRT035)

Attend this talk to learn how you can empower your business stakeholders with clarity and highly personalized insights to unlock all the cloud has to offer. Learn tactics and best practices for developing your AWS cost management strategy by minimizing noise and maximizing the relevance between your FinOps practice and your unique business objectives. This presentation is brought to you by Anodot, an AWS Partner.

Learn more about AWS re:Invent at https://go.aws/3ikK4dD.

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Content

0.57 -> - So before I begin today, I want you to think

2.46 -> about your own cloud cost management journey.

5.67 -> As we're talking to different people at the show,

7.47 -> we're seeing that there's a wide range of sophistication

10.5 -> within their FinOps practices,

12.54 -> cloud cost management practices.

14.07 -> Some businesses are just starting to begin to think

16.92 -> about cloud cost management.

18.51 -> Some businesses have very sophisticated

21.299 -> cost centers of excellence or dedicated FinOps teams,

25.38 -> but I want you to think about where your business is.

28.02 -> The FinOps Foundation, it's part of the Linux Foundation,

30.93 -> they offer a great model

33.27 -> for managing your cloud cost strategy,

38.13 -> and it actually consists of three phases, six domains,

41.58 -> 18 capabilities, and three maturity levels across each,

45.12 -> crawl, walk, and run.

47.13 -> So as you're thinking

48.33 -> about what your level of sophistication is

50.22 -> across each of these things,

51.45 -> you can kind of put it in that context.

53.61 -> So regardless of where you actually are

55.5 -> with your level of sophistication,

57.24 -> today you're gonna learn

58.073 -> how to empower all of your FinOps stakeholders

60.39 -> with clarity and highly personalized insights.

67.47 -> We're gonna explore how to develop

69.09 -> your AWS Cloud Financial Management strategy

72.03 -> to minimize noise and maximize the relevance

74.85 -> between your FinOps practice and your business objectives.

78.45 -> We're gonna look at the relationship

79.86 -> between FinOps and business value.

82.44 -> We'll discuss how above all FinOps is about relationships

86.7 -> and why insight is critical to driving collaboration.

91.5 -> We'll talk about what makes a FinOps insight valuable,

94.32 -> and how we deliver

95.7 -> and develop the insights we give you at Anodot,

99.48 -> and we'll explore ways to drive increased clarity

102.18 -> across your organization to grow your AWS value.

108.24 -> So what's the value of FinOps, anyway?

110.7 -> Folks mistakenly think that it's all about scrutinizing

113.7 -> and reducing the cloud bill, but it's actually not.

116.43 -> At Anodot, we believe the value of FinOps

118.68 -> is all about driving increased revenue

120.66 -> from your AWS investment.

122.94 -> FinOps accelerates the value you get from AWS,

125.94 -> yes, by helping you to reduce costs,

128.31 -> but by primarily shifting the culture

130.62 -> of your organization from one of traditional silos

134.94 -> to one that is collaborative.

136.71 -> To enable that shift, the FinOps Foundation

139.95 -> recommends three phases, which we align here at Anodot.

144.39 -> The first phase is in form.

147.03 -> We call this visibility.

148.59 -> This is all about enabling every stakeholder

150.78 -> to understand their costs

152.16 -> and how they relate to your business.

154.41 -> On the finance side, we see that this often is a place

157.5 -> where your FinOps strategy might break down,

160.65 -> and we'll talk a little bit how to get over that challenge.

164.43 -> Secondly is optimization.

166.92 -> This is understanding how to

168.87 -> and actually using the cloud more efficiently.

172.02 -> On the engineering side,

174.12 -> we see this is where FinOps initiatives can also break down.

176.97 -> And actually we've heard some real horror stories

179.7 -> usually caused by a lack of empathy

182.093 -> between finance and engineering.

184.77 -> We'll talk a little bit about how to fix that today.

188.67 -> The third is operate. We call this monitoring.

192.96 -> This is all about achieving highly sophisticated

196.14 -> and predictable cloud operations

198.12 -> where you can look ahead with a great deal of accuracy

200.91 -> and you're never surprised by your cloud bill.

203.79 -> And yes, we've actually added a fourth.

205.5 -> The FinOps Foundation doesn't have this,

207.36 -> but we think that it's important

209.64 -> to not wait to start improving

211.92 -> your cloud financial management strategy.

214.47 -> You need to start today.

216 -> So that's the value of FinOps, but can we boil FinOps down

220.02 -> into some kind of like a secret sauce?

224.67 -> So the FinOps Foundation defines FinOps

227.94 -> as a framework of people, principles, and phases of action

233.43 -> and says that its core, FinOps is a cultural practice.

237.21 -> That's the people in your organization

238.89 -> and how they work together to leverage AWS

241.35 -> for organizational success.

243.06 -> In fact, the first five principles of FinOps

245.82 -> are all about people.

248.34 -> But each of these personas is different.

250.26 -> They have different needs, goals, and pain points.

255.27 -> Business management wants to track and show the impact

259.89 -> of cloud costs on investment, on revenue.

263.19 -> Finance wants accountability, and they want a guarantee

266.22 -> that the cloud is being used ever more prudently,

269.1 -> and DevOps wants to achieve operational efficiency

272.13 -> and deliver higher service quality.

274.71 -> So what's one thing you can deliver

276.15 -> to all these personas to empower better FinOps?

280.83 -> What's the electricity to run your FinOps engine?

285.03 -> It's insight.

287.07 -> It's helping the right people know the right thing

288.99 -> at just the right time, and not coincidentally.

291.42 -> That's what we're totally focused on at Anodot.

296.67 -> So insights could take a lot of forms.

298.89 -> What makes a good insight?

300.84 -> I've identified a few qualities here

303.06 -> that we leverage at Anodot.

304.83 -> The first is timely.

306 -> You want insights to be just in time

308.01 -> and to arrive when they're actually actionable.

312.24 -> Accurate.

313.073 -> The fastest way to lose all credibility

315.03 -> is to provide any kind of inaccurate information.

317.7 -> Precision is critical.

320.4 -> Meaningful. Insights can't be trivial.

322.83 -> Is that a meaningful anomaly that you've detected

325.41 -> or is it just noise?

328.38 -> Automated.

330.21 -> Yes, there's a place for dashboards and reports

332.49 -> and occasionally doing a project-driven deep dive

335.25 -> into something in your infrastructure,

336.99 -> but generally you want insights to come to you autonomously.

342.42 -> And finally, accessible.

344.61 -> You want insights to be easy to understand and manage.

347.22 -> And an accessible insight

348.84 -> means that your team can generalize

351.72 -> versus becoming a expert on one core area of FinOps.

355.89 -> And also you'll be able

357.3 -> to avoid costly professional services contracts,

361.17 -> and you won't need to spin up an entire data science team

363.87 -> to develop and maintain algorithms

366.06 -> for anomaly detection and forecasting.

369.63 -> So a side effect of this highly, you know, powerful insights

374.46 -> is that it's actually a shortcut

375.84 -> to run level competency across all the phases of FinOps.

381.18 -> So if it's as easy as providing insights,

384.84 -> what's stopping all organizations

386.76 -> from achieving this FinOps nirvana?

389.01 -> Well, there's two places

390.18 -> that FinOps efforts traditionally stall.

393.12 -> For finance teams, it's generally during the informed phase,

395.7 -> and for DevOps teams,

396.69 -> it's generally during the optimization phase.

398.64 -> And this is, like I mentioned, usually caused

400.77 -> by a little bit of a lack of empathy

402.15 -> between the two departments.

404.31 -> In fact, the FinOps Foundation

406.71 -> has in their annual survey for the past two years

409.62 -> has identified somewhat insensitively worded,

412.23 -> getting engineers to take action,

414.12 -> as the number one reported issue

416.43 -> amongst companies trying to achieve FinOps.

418.56 -> So there's definitely a lack of understanding

420.78 -> between the two groups.

422.34 -> Better insights can fix this.

425.07 -> One of our customers, a midsize IT security company,

427.95 -> has over 120 users of our product that are active

431.34 -> across all these different departments,

433.65 -> finance, DevOps, engineering, and the business.

437.25 -> We also find, with our optimization recommendations,

440.1 -> there's a very high rate of adoption.

442.26 -> So we're helping to break down this challenge,

444.81 -> and we see similar behavior to that in all of our customers.

449.43 -> So when I talk to FinOps practitioners,

451.41 -> there's one other big issue I hear about a lot.

454.38 -> With many FinOps tools,

455.82 -> initially, you'll see a tremendous amount of value,

458.31 -> but over time, you'll see that value

459.96 -> and usage tend to decrease and drop significantly.

463.59 -> At Anodot, we call this the wall.

465.69 -> I'm also gonna talk about how you can vault this

467.64 -> with better insights.

470.1 -> Another one of Anodot customers,

472.74 -> that's a long time customer,

474.09 -> just saved over a million dollars in the last quarter

477.33 -> due to operationalizing our insights.

479.64 -> We also see a very high rate of renewal.

481.44 -> So we're helping,

483.15 -> we don't see this wall amongst our customers

484.98 -> where value kind of drops off,

487.782 -> but I'm gonna talk a little bit about how insight

489.21 -> can also help you achieve ongoing value as well.

493.59 -> So I'm also gonna talk a little bit

495.12 -> about why our customers might not be hitting this wall.

499.29 -> And that's because we focus on insights

501.18 -> that are not just powerful,

502.53 -> but also highly relevant to the people, these personas.

510.21 -> When insights are people-focused,

511.89 -> they enable collaboration with the right audience

514.56 -> getting the right information at the right time.

517.17 -> They enable a shared language

519.21 -> so departments can communicate effectively.

521.31 -> At one of our customers, Aqua Security and others,

524.01 -> they volunteer that engineering, business,

526.23 -> and finance are all able to share a common language

528.84 -> with the Anodot platform to collaborate.

532.53 -> And finally, when insights are relevant to each persona,

535.38 -> you can develop and achieve performance metrics.

539.67 -> To show progress and real value growth due to AWS,

543.51 -> one thing we focus on Anodot is tracking among other things,

547.41 -> which of our recommendations you implement

549.36 -> and the dollar value of that.

551.28 -> So we're very big on KPI enablement.

553.95 -> So what are some practical, tactical things you can do

556.38 -> to start delivering persona-driven insights?

561.15 -> Start with AWS.

567.54 -> We find that all of our customers have started

570.18 -> with the AWS native tools,

571.44 -> and they're actually very powerful.

574.29 -> We also find that across the industry,

575.94 -> folks are under utilizing

577.62 -> AWS's native cost management capabilities significantly.

581.94 -> They have some great resources.

583.8 -> So I'm gonna give you a couple high level tips.

586.68 -> The first is to understand and leverage Cost Explorer fully.

590.22 -> The tool keeps getting better.

591.39 -> There was recently a new release that was great

593.91 -> and I think it's got a lot of promise going forward.

597.6 -> Take advantage of the the well-architected dashboards,

601.8 -> especially the CUDOS dashboards to deliver insight

603.99 -> and visibility for your teams.

605.25 -> This can get you a lot of the way to what we deliver

607.65 -> from a insight perspective, at least for AWS.

612.03 -> You wanna make sure you're leveraging AWS budgets

614.61 -> and AWS budget actions to control costs.

618.21 -> And these last two are actually a reminder

620.46 -> to challenge your organization.

621.84 -> I think that's an important part of FinOps.

624.33 -> You know, I think that engineers can typically pick up

627.36 -> finance concepts actually quite easily.

630.18 -> And you know, finance practitioners might say,

632.677 -> "Oh, I'm not technical."

634.02 -> But with a little bit of knowledge about AWS,

636.69 -> they can start to help engineering

638.94 -> maybe focus a little bit more

640.2 -> on when maybe an Arm powered instance

642.21 -> that's gonna have a much lower price

643.62 -> might be possible to use

646.23 -> or actually start operationalizing the recommendations

649.62 -> from AWS Compute Optimizer.

651.678 -> (audience chattering)

654.75 -> So when you're ready to level up,

656.46 -> that's where Anodot comes in.

661.11 -> What separates us from other tools

662.7 -> that deliver a lot of powerful visibility,

664.89 -> including for Kubernetes

666.36 -> from the cluster down to the pod level,

668.43 -> is that we focus on enabling you

670.89 -> to get the right business insights for any business metric

674.07 -> to the right people at the right time.

676.35 -> We service a huge range

678.686 -> of highly personalized cost recommendations

681.39 -> that your team will actually get behind.

683.34 -> We help our customers achieve meaningful savings.

687.66 -> Thirdly is machine learning-driven monitoring.

690.93 -> We have very relevant anomaly detection

693.3 -> that separates urgent anomalies from noise,

697.35 -> and we have the highest accuracy cost forecasting available

700.98 -> with a mind blowing 98.5% median accuracy.

705.03 -> We're also constantly bringing new capabilities

707.13 -> focused on people to market, and we're priced affordably.

710.88 -> The last thing you want is a tax on top of your AWS budget.

715.41 -> And so Anodot's all in on AWS.

718.23 -> We're available in the AWS marketplace.

720.06 -> And I'd love if you would all come by

721.47 -> and see us at booth 2540.

723.6 -> We're down here right by Druva.

726.39 -> Or you can visit us on online at anodot.com/cloud.

730.5 -> So as I conclude, I want you to remember one thing

732.45 -> as you go back and pursue better cloud financial management

735.93 -> at your organizations.

737.16 -> You'll find the most FinOps success

739.17 -> if each action you take is done in service

741.75 -> of driving collaboration, empathy,

745.38 -> and insight for each stakeholder in your organization.

748.59 -> Thank you so much.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1qmtScctww