News & Announcements from Cloud Service Providers

Azure

Microsoft Cost Management team summarized the recent updates released in August including a MCA (Microsoft Customer Agreement) billing account to consolidate and manage multiple Azure Active Directory tenants in an organization, and some preview features like potential cost savings insights and cost forecast available in Cost Management Labs.

• Microsoft Cost Management updates – August 2022 (Microsoft Azure Blog, Aug 31st)

Google Cloud

Apigee is a tool provided by Google Cloud to manage APIs securely and at scale, and had been delivered by subscription pricing model with Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise plus tiering. Google Cloud introduced a new pricing option of pay-as-you-go model for customers considering to start small with a high value workload.

• Introducing Pay-as-you-go pricing for Apigee API Management (Google Cloud Blog, Aug 31st)

Other Readers from Cloud Service Providers

AWS

AWS Cloud Financial Management (CFM) Blog provides a nice recap of the CFM discussions which took place during AWS Summits starting with some typical questions. There were some more posts mentioning the ways to reduce and optimize the costs on specific AWS services like Amazon EKS and S3.

• Recap of Cloud Financial Management (CFM) Customer Engagement on 2022 AWS Summits (AWS Cloud Financial Management Blog, Aug 31st)
• Understanding and Cost Optimizing Amazon EKS Control Plane Logs (AWS Containers Blog, Sept 6th)
• Manage Amazon S3 storage costs granularly and at scale using S3 Intelligent-Tiering (AWS Storage Blog, Sept 7th)

Google Cloud

CUDs (committed use discounts) are discounted prices Google Cloud offers in exchange for the commitment to use a minimum level of resources for a specified term (either one or three years) which can save up to 70% in the costs on respective cloud resources as Reserved Instances (RIs) in AWS. Google Cloud recently published a white paper to elaborate a strategy to leverage the advantage of CUDs.

• Maximize Cost Efficiency with CUD Optimization Strategy (PDF) (White Paper, Aug 2022)

FinOps Case Studies

Two recent posts in AWS Blogs introduce cost optimization practices at its customers. Devo, a cloud-native logging and security analytics platform, achieved cost effectiveness and performance optimization with two Amazon EBS volume types without decreasing its customer experience while Motive, a tracking and fleet management solution provider, encountered a 21% increase in its AWS spending during the COVID-19 pandemic and managed to save 85% of the cost by modernizing the solution architecture with replacing Amazon Elastic Transcoder with Amazon Elemental MediaConvert.

• How Devo’s security analytics solution uses Amazon EBS to optimize storage cost and performance (AWS Storage Blog, Aug 24th)
• How AWS customer Motive optimized video cost using AWS Elemental MediaConvert (AWS Media Blog, Sept 6th)

Views, Opinions and Trends

FinOps is now becoming a hot topic. Both of the two recent articles below on technology media illustrates the overview of this new concept with mentioning the FinOps Foundation's The State of FinOps 2022 report. Both correctly conclude that an organizational culture is a crucial factor to achieve a successful FinOps implementation.

• FinOps: The Why, What and How (The New Stack, Sept 1st)
• Exploring the Emerging Role of FinOps (DevOps.com, Sept 9th)

Wall Street Journal and Reuters reported the video streaming giant's attempts to reduce costs including controlling the cloud computing costs against the recent struggle in subscriber growth. Proper control over increasing cloud spending and, furthermore, intelligent investment in cloud computing in exchange for the value it brings is becoming more important in the time of economic downturn.

• Netflix looks to control cloud computing costs with AWS - WSJ (Reuters, Sept 8th)

Related article

Gartner published the latest Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies report in early August and many FinOps practitioners might have taken notice of a novel term, "augmented FinOps". Our recent column explored what the augmented FinOps is and the background behind.

• Column: “Augmented FinOps” (CCoE Lab: Alphaus Blog, Aug 30th)