Cloud FinOps: Actionable Insights for monitoring and reducing cloud spend
We helped one of our strategic clients improve their FinOps functions by providing visibility into their cloud spend across different business units. Our dashboards helped the client’s senior leaders understand their KPIs for cloud usage and set goals for savings.
About the Client
Client is a multinational insurance analytics firm with over $2 billion in revenue. They provide risk solutions to the insurance industry. The firm’s business units predominantly use AWS for their workloads, with an annual cloud spend in tens of million of dollars.
Client’s need and Problem statement
Client had 400+ AWS accounts with different business units each with their own accelerated plans of cloud adoption. Their AWS costs were rising quickly and they wanted to provide senior leaders as well as developers better visibility of the cloud spend so they can predict usage costs as well as identify opportunities for cost savings.
Tech Stack
PowerBI
Redshift
Glue
Lambda
CloudWatch
DynamoDB
Batch
Python
Our solution and outcomes
- We designed and developed a business intelligence solution that mined AWS Cost Usage Reports (CUR) data, transformed / organized the data for easier consumption and published several dashboards that explored key areas of spend.
- We also provided insights for optimizing cloud spend. Some of these include:
- Purchases Reserved Instances vs using On demand instances
- Migrating to optimized version of EBS storage based on usage
- Using Spot instances for containerized workflows wherever possible
- Identifying and auto stopping/decommissioning of Workspaces which are not used frequently.
- Understanding different S3 storage tiers and migrating S3 objects to appropriate storage tiers.
- Our solution saved 95% of manual effort in creating these reports. Our insights brought in savings of $100+K per month.
