FinOps
@setoide
Javier Turegano
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Hello everyone, my name is Javier Turegano and I am the
Infrastructure and Architecture manager at realestate.com.au.
I am here to tak about FinOps or how Finance and Operations can
collaborate better.
For someone with an engineering background like me talking to
the finance people always has felt a bit like this.
OPEX, CAPEX, EBIDTA, Below the line, depreciation, taxes were
not part of my vocabulary.
And this is how many times the conversation ended. Where is my
money? What happened to my budget?
Not having a common language was really frustating for both
parts.
This problem sounds familiar: functional teams operating in
different silos.
Not sharing:- Goals- Incentives- Vocabulary
And sometimes they dont even sit in the same floor.
Could we use some of the lessons that we have learned in the
Devops community to facilitate this collaboration?
Meet Katerina, who joined the REA finance team as IT Commercial
manager in 2015.
A Russian finance person and a Spaniard from IT walk into a bar
I mean an Australian business, and they want to change the game.
This is not a joke.
Attending standups which at the beginning may have sound like an
alien speech and sharing the day to ay with the teams created a
common ground for us to start cooperating.
The original feedback loop
Speeeeeeeend
Bad news
Freeeeeeeeze
Buy ALL The Things
Budget
But where did we started?
Feedback loops are probably familiar to anyone working in IT.
This is how my finance feedback loop looked like in the pass.
Explain graph.
Short feedback loop
Spend
Measure
Learn
Spend
Measure
Learn
Spend
Measure
Learn
...
Speeeeeeeend
Bad news
Freeeeeeeeze
Buy ALL The Things
Budget
This is how it looks like now. We work in shorter iteraions of
spending, measuring and learning. Katerina generates a montly
report where I can review how my people, tech, training,
entertainment budgets are tracking and act accordingly.
Attending standups which at the beginning may have sound like an
alien speech and sharing the day to ay with the teams created a
common ground for us to start cooperating.
Focusing in what matters
30%
50%
10%
AWS cost
FY15
FY16
FY17
Thorugh this constant conversation and short feedback loops weve
been able to identify some of the biggest problems.
As you can see our growth of the expenditure in the cloud looks
somehow exponential. With a 10% growth in the first year, then 30%
and 50% on the last year. There are reasons for this but could we
optimize it and get it back into control?
Reserved
Spot
On Demand
Rightsizing
Autoscaling
Elasticity
Utilization
Peak
Tagging
AWS-nomics
Containers
Serverless
As with any problem understanding the domain knowledge is key to
provide meaningful solutions. And the economics around AWS are more
and more complicated.
You need to understand usage types, accounting, elasticity,
utilization, rightsizing, severless, etc...
And we started with a Hackday project. We run hackdays every
three months and they are a great opportunity to create something
quick and share it with the rest of the business.
Our focus was to provide visibility into who was spending what
and if that expendeture could be qualified as some sort of
waste.
Weve created an information radiator that we could put in front
of everyone. I am sure this will resonate with the Devops
community.
Making the opportunity visible was the first step to make this
something important to everyone.
Enforce-o-tron
From there we got some extra budget to develop
enforce-o-tron.
An AWS event driven serverless tool that terminates any
resources that were not properly tagged with a costcode that will
allow us to identify which business unit was accountable for the
cost.
You are probably familiar with Wernels statement: You build it,
you run it. Again something that could easily be another of the
Devops principles.
Helps keeping the accoutnability in the teams that create the
services and helps to incentivate good behaviours around the health
of our services because in your own interest.
You pay for it
Katerina Martianova (REA)You are probably familiar with Wernels
statement: You build it, you run it. Again something that could
easily be another of the Devops principles.
Helps keeping the accoutnability in the teams that create the
services and helps to incentivate good behaviours around the health
of our services because in your own interest.
WHAT ARE THE NEXT STEPS
And now that we have visibility and ownership of the accounts we
can't stop here.We are up to help the different teams save money
via recommendations, trainning and clustering.
OUTCOMES SO FAR
So far we are aiming to reduce our yearly cost by 15%.Only in
the first week of running enforce-tron we were able to kill 60
unclaimed instances.Cost saving activities are common between the
different teams.
The two take aways from my talk are:
- Dont understimate the power of collaborating and learning from
other functional areas.- Dont understimate the amount of hot-pot
that FinOps cost optimizations can buy.
Thank you.
