Building a Cost-Centric Culture with FinOps

By Devangi Goswami, Khushi Carpenter / Apr 01, 2023

Introduction:

Our client, a SaaS solution provider, after having re-architected their multi-tenant multi-user platform to scale to 4000+ customers, was facing the challenge of controlling their cloud cost due to their fast-growing customer base. They wanted to have more visibility and control over their cloud resources and to reduce costs without compromising performance and scalability.

Company Overview:

Name: Software Vendor

Location: MA, USA

Established: 2007

Employees: 900+

Revenue: $300M

Challenges:

The customer’s primary challenge was managing storage costs due to the unique requirements of their business from a content management perspective. Although the customer was utilizing AWS's intelligent tiering option for Amazon S3, they believed that they could achieve better results.

Technology Solutions:

After evaluating the FinOps challenges faced by the software vendor, the FinOps team recommended implementing cloudability.

  1. Improved recommendation for storage cost optimization
  2. Setup anomaly detection to accurately detect abnormal variances.
  3. User-friendly cost explorer
  4. Enhanced automation capabilities

Implementation Strategy:

In close collaboration with the customer, our team defined their main KPIs, expected automation and alerting systems and implemented all of them.

  • Define KPIs and generate reports that provide insight into cloud usage and spending and use these reports to identify opportunities for optimization.
  • A robust cost allocation tagging strategy to track and monitor cloud spending by team, department, project, or end customers.
  • Developed a FinOps capability that included processes for rightsizing, re-architecting, and implementing a savings plan.
  • Implemented the alerting system.

Results and Impact:

The customer successfully reduced their storage usage costs by 40% after implementing FinOps capability.
This was primarily due to the following factors:

  • Close monitoring of cloud spending and resource utilization
  • Rightsizing of cloud resources to match the actual demand
  • Real-time alerting on anomalies
  • Implementation of a savings plan to proactively identify cost-saving opportunities

Lessons Learned:

Throughout the implementation process, we learned several valuable lessons about building a successful FinOps capability, including:

  • The importance of close collaboration with the client to understand their unique needs and requirements is key. The storage resource usage was the main resource to be closely monitored in that case.
  • The value of ongoing monitoring and optimization to ensure ongoing cost savings.
  • The need for strong training and mentoring of the FinOps team to ensure ongoing success.


The need for cross-functional collaboration to ensure that the FinOps capability was aligned with the client's overall business objectives.

Conclusion:

By partnering with Intuitive.Cloud to build a FinOps capability, the client was able to optimize their application architecture and achieve significant cost savings. The combination of close monitoring, rightsizing, re-architecting, and savings planning helped the client improve their cloud resource utilization while maintaining performance and scalability. The client is now equipped with a self-sustaining FinOps team that can continue to manage their cloud spending effectively.