Rootconf Mini 2024

Cloud computing benefits organizations in many ways. The benefits are so numerous that it makes it almost impossible not to consider moving business operations to a cloud-based platform. Easier said than done, multiple organizations get trapped in the pricing model – “Pay as you go”, and this not well understood, has resulted in wastages. As per Finops surveys, the key priorities for 2024 are as follows: more than 50% reported that the biggest priority for organizations is to reduce wastage.

To control this wastage, most organizations have a set of guidelines, which generally are not followed in complex product development settings. This is where the role of DevOps can be crucial, who can ensure these guidelines get transformed into guardrails and automated flows?

This talk will present key areas where DevOps can play a key role in ensuring reduced cloud costs and also possibilities of automating the controls, without really disrupting the velocity of innovation. They will understand centrally controlled vs distributed responsibilities and how various personas in the team should work together for more accountable decisions. It will cover a strategy to create a basic audit framework to record all decisions taken by teams.

For the sake of this, all demo and examples will be shown on Microsoft Azure, with mapping to GCP and AWS. For DevOps, we will use automated pipelines on GitLab.

Agenda:

• Cloud Cost Model and Added Responsibilities

• Superimposing FinOps on traditional DevOps

• Reducing wastage - Cleanups and Adherence to Best Practices.

• Iterative Infrastructure planning and right sizing

• Recommendations

Key Takeways

Many people are discussing different ways to handle costs. While some focus on reacting to high prices and finding ways to reduce costs after the fact, this discussion offers a unique approach by suggesting proactive steps to control costs. Large enterprises with substantial on-premises infrastructure often approach the cloud in a similar way to on-premises systems, so there needs to be a shift in mindset across development and operations teams when building software. This discussion aims to help the audience understand a more structured, proactive approach to solving the cloud cost problem by making cost-aware decisions at different stages of software development: design, implementation, and maintenance.

Instead of treating cost optimization as a one-time event, this discussion highlights that cloud cost should be considered as just another non-functional requirement (NFR), similar to reliability and security.

Audience: Developers, Architects, Project management, Product owners.