While conserving cash is top of mind for every tech company—especially looking ahead to uncertain economic conditions—there are still organizations that haven’t effectively implemented Cloud FinOps. In fact, many companies aren’t even tracking their Effective Savings Rate, which is a quantifiable measure of actual cloud savings.
Cloud FinOps is an evolving cloud financial management discipline and cultural practice that enables organizations to get maximum business value (ROI) from their cloud investment. This requires a strategic approach for using AWS cost savings mechanisms to optimize cloud spending and achieve a greater Effective Savings Rate.
In December, ProsperOps hosted a webinar with the CFO Leadership Council about FinOps and cloud cost optimization. This webinar will help you learn how commitment management and optimizing discount rates can drive down your cloud costs.
Read on to discover what to expect from the webinar, along with a few tips that can reduce your AWS cloud costs today.
Learn How to Reduce Cloud Costs in this Webinar
During the webinar, you’ll learn about Cloud FinOps and how cloud cost optimization—specifically, rate optimization—can help you reduce your cloud costs. More importantly, we’ll break down three popular approaches to optimizing cloud costs, diving deeper into the one method that offers the most bang for your buck, leveraging cloud discount instruments like AWS Reserved Instances and Savings Plans.
You’ll also hear from an AWS customer about their direct cost savings, time savings, risk reduction and the steps they took to get there. Along with these insights, we’ll cover additional practical tips to implement a successful FinOps and cost optimization practice.
How You Can Quickly Reduce AWS Costs
While the webinar will be jam-packed with helpful strategies to reduce cloud costs, here are a few approaches that can be implemented almost immediately with AWS.
Discount Instruments
There are two discount instruments available with AWS: Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans. Reserved Instances allow you to enter a contract for computing resources at a discount, which is much cheaper than the equivalent on-demand capacity. That said, the amount of savings can vary depending on the type and length of the RI contract and how much you pay upfront.
Similarly, Savings Plans offer discounted rates for longer-term commitments. You agree to purchase an amount of compute per hour, which can be used within a certain period of time. The overall discount rate for Savings Plans will also depend on the length of the commitment and how much you pay upfront.
Both of these discount instruments require commiting to a specific capacity level or hourly price beforehand, but can significantly reduce the cost of baseline or steady resource usage. This is generally the easiest cloud cost optimization mechanism to start with.
Enterprise Discount Programs
Enterprise discount programs (EDPs) are negotiated discounts for organizations that have very large spends on AWS. By agreeing to maintain a certain volume of consumption over the long term, enterprises can enter a tailored agreement with AWS at discounted rates. This is essentially a way for large enterprises to achieve economies of scale, but isn’t suitable for smaller companies.
Private Pricing & Credits
Another mechanism for reducing cloud costs is to take advantage of AWS Promotional Credits, which are private credits that can be applied to the bills of eligible services. This option is limited to organizations that are managing sustainability-related data (Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative), certain startups (AWS Activate Portfolio), non-profits (AWS IMAGINE Grant), EdTech companies (AWS EdStart) and other projects that AWS chooses to support.
Join ProsperOps and the CFO Leadership Council
There are a number of ways to approach optimizing AWS cloud spend, so it can be challenging to know where to begin when you want to implement a Cloud FinOps strategy. Our upcoming webinar with the CFO Leadership Council will include valuable insights about cost savings tactics to significantly reduce your cloud costs.
Watch this FinOps webinar replay, cohosted with the CFO Leadership Council.
