Optimizing costs of cloud infrastructures

On 26 November 2021, Nandish Madhu - Director of Product Development for Cloud Engineering and Operations at Intuit - responded to Pravanjan’s presentation on cloud cost mental models. He drew upon the experiences of optimizing cloud costs infrastructure at Intuit.

Intuit gained valuable lessons during the transition from on-prem data center set-up to cloud computing. The company is now one hundred percent on the cloud with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as their main provider, and some other providers. Minimizing rates (for cloud spends) at Intuit are largely attributed to enterprise discounts, securing reserved instances and savings plans.

Below are some of the highlights from Nandish’s response:

1. Intuit consumes close to 20 million cloud resources across 15 regions and performs extensive analytics on cloud cost management and optimization. On a busy day, Intuit’s teams process up to 40 billion rows of data as part of cost analytics.
2. To manage costs in the cloud, Intuit practices Cloud Financial Operations (FinOps) model. The aim is to bring transparency and visibility on cloud cost spend and to optimize cloud consumption to all the employees in the organization, including the financers, developers and leaders.
3. Intuit’s operations are complex because of multiple business units and employees, with different levels of cloud service consumption. There is a need for a cost optimization programme which identifies leakages. Optimization of cloud cost is primarily driven by establishing design best practices and cost sensors to identify inefficiencies in resource utilizations. Cost sensors perform automated audits which look for unused and underutilized resources and sub-optimal design patterns. This audit provides rich metrics and analytics around the data obtained. The insights are conveyed to the developers so that they know how to manage expenditure.
   Identified inefficiencies are addressed through well-established processes and tooling that include centralized remediation as well as shared ownership across various business units.
4. Developers are given resources that help them to understand cloud costs (and to encourage a culture of innovation). Mainly, any developer in Inuit can obtain an AWS learning account to experiment. This is paid for by the company. There is a simultaneous system of auto termination of accounts to prevent the accumulation of unused accounts.
5. In a large company, it is hard to get people to read reports and follow cost-cutting practices. Business units are given a threshold wastage percentage that they must not exceed. This makes business unit leaders accountable and provides an incentive to make sure that their teams do not cross the wastage threshold.
   To facilitate cross department understanding, Intuit built a common dashboard so that everyone is aware of the budget, and is able to ask themselves questions like, “if I add this new service, how will it impact the overall cost?”. The key is to make sure that everyone in the organization is empowered, and has a sense of ownership around cost management.
6. Over time, Intuit has found that cost optimization is only possible when each team has separate billing.

This summary is compiled by Chantal Janine D’Costa, with review and edits by Nandish Madhu and Zainab Bawa.