FinOps and GreenOps successes on AWS: A customer story

Hello, everyone. Thank you for being here. How is it going so far? Nice and busy. Yeah. All right. Thank you for being here. My name is Michelle Zitman and I'm a Cloud Financial Management Practice Lead at Sibia.

So, first of all, thank you all for being here and it's an honor to be talking to you. All right, let's kick this off.

So today we're gonna talk about FOPS and Green S and of course, I'm not gonna only talk about it. I will share some success stories and I hope you enjoyed that. We will define a little bit about those two concepts and talk about Cloud S and then dive straight into what the customer achieved and then just look into a few takeaways, we only have 20 minutes. So that's gonna be fast. And I hope really do hope that you take somebody with you out of this talk.

All right. So very quickly, a bit about Cia Sibia is actually an IT consultancy firm and software development firm that originated in the Netherlands and is now based in the US. We basically strive to take care of all the digital transformation of our customers and we do that basically on this four values, right? We base everything on that and we have one single mission which is basically be an authority on every single field we operate in. And we do that, of course for AWS.

So talking about cloud ops, yeah, when we look at the cloud ops, we're talking about cloud operations and talking about cloud operations, it is important to set a stage and say, hey, what is a cloud operating model? It's what it organizations actually do. We fin their companies to actually operationalize everything related to the cloud. So we have a few dimensions to that. We have dav ops, we have sac ops and we also have fins and green ops.

So actually let's look a little bit about that and define those. So we are coming from the same background. So cloud financial management a k a fin ops is what actually brings financial accountability to the cloud. The cloud changed everything, not only how we operate and actually execute and code and deploy things, but also how finance departments actually have to deal with that. We move from opex to capex and actually it's really hard, but people need to be accountable for that. We all here probably have access to aws accounts, we deploy things and actually this is costing money. So who approved that? Who said we could do so? But anyhow, it changed and there has to be something to help us operationalize and streamline this.

So we look at this as a big domain and fops actually the operational side of it. But we need to have strategy, we need to have knowledge, we need to have governance processes and then we can actually operationalize all of it.

So to help our customers, we actually say you need to strive to a direction and this is about what good looks like. So we need information, it needs to be reliable and it needs to be accessible. We need to have knowledge about it and you need to have objectives. What do you want to achieve when you implement that? And then you need to make the responsibilities clear, you need to make governance available and processes and you need to get eventually business related kps. Without this, almost everything becomes a bit mean meaningless.

So to get this started because all of this will not come from day one. Believe me, it's hard work, it's difficult to get there, but it's possible and we want to get that started. So we developed a flying wheel and this fly wheel just says awareness drives accountability which in turn demands awareness, people actually will take action on things. If they see that. If they see something, they have the ability to change and they can do it, they will do it. And once they do, they say well did it work, did it move the needle and then they will go back to awareness and that keeps going. And what's really critical here is to talk about efficiency. We're not talking about cost reduction. We are really looking at, hey, am i being better than i was yesterday? Because this is what we can measure. This is actually what can be translated to business value. Yeah, cost reduction on its own. Yeah, my bill on the cloud is a lot lower. So what do you have more customers or you also lost all your, all of your customers and your bill is lower, right? It needs to be efficiency and let me stop there because i'm not gonna be extensive. It's not supposed to be a very difficult talk about fops, but it's important to grasp that.

Now, let's look about green s in the same way fops is about a financial accountability. Green s talks about environmental accountability and this has become increasingly important and demanded by organizations all over.

So what do we want to do here is to understand that it doesn't matter how many layers of abstraction we have, there are emissions going on, we just don't see them, right? We see an api we see a console, we deploy our beautiful things in the cloud, but somewhere there are emissions happening, how can we bring them up? So we want to build awareness and understanding about those emissions. So actually we can act on greenhouse uh gasses primarily co2. But actually this is about efficiency again, right? More efficiency on the cloud, we can relate to decreased reductions. And this is becoming important because there are regulations coming out in europe in the us. And it's important companies and organizations will be mandated to report on those. How can you show what you are doing the good work you are doing if you do not have awareness and visibility on that?

So in the same way, we have a po practice, we developed a greenhouse practice and we actually take the input of visibility. Yeah, from the k report for those not familiar the cost and usage report and we reach that so we can transform data into information. And in the other hand, we are helping organizations to actually define what are their targets and the governance, they have to do how they need to communicate with the people, right? And then they can optimize.

So if we need to have visibility and if we need to report and if we need to have a plan and optimize, hey, wait a second, this really looks familiar. Yes, fops and green ups really do have a lot in common. You need to gain visibility, understand the data report, establish benchmarks and then you drive accountability, assess the results repeat and no, those are not minions. They are actual steps for to get you there. Yeah.

And how do you get visibility into your carbon emissions? You need somewhere to see really granular data. So we developed our sustainability dashboard that actually gives a meaningful uh information. So you can take action and actually go and really drill down on what's going on. Have heat maps. Our dashboard is based on aws quick site and the k report and is supported on ad aws environment, of course, and it actually works really well because instead of just saying, oh, what is the total emissions? And then, wow, i can do something, i can stop one instance when you look back, if it's so high level, you don't know if it's happening.

So we managed to get you actionable meaningful information. If you have tags, you can distribute this information, the emissions information into projects or applications, whatever you're using, it really becomes actionable because you can tell, hey, that one, that project is actually most of our emissions. So who is taking care of that? And then you can talk only to that person and they know what they can do, right? It doesn't matter if you send it all the way up the chain, they have no clue what can be done. They just know there is something going on. But yeah, we should delete all these ebs volumes. Yeah. Who says i can, you need to get to the right person and the only way to do that is to enable them to see what's going on.

So now that we have established a baseline and have developed a common understanding of those two dimensions of the of cloud ops. Let's talk about a succe success case. So we'll be talking today about our dear customer, the vacant retail group. They are actually one of the leading but online retailers and they are on the a aws journey for many, many years and they use aws to basically build a platform and build up their own brands and serve their customers. We are talking about petabytes of data. They currently have three brands included in that platform on a microservice based uh uh aws uh platform. And they actually are looking into acquiring or building up new brands for their model. So this needs to be very scalable and ideally very efficient to give you an idea. Vam has has over half a million visitors a day and over 600 million in revenue for last year and this is meaningful in in the market they operate.

So although they are in their journey for so long, they came to us and said, hey, we need to be able to actually show business of the value of cloud. We are using so much of that, but it's starting to be perceived as cost like it was usually perceived in the past. How do we change that? How do we make sure that it's meaningful and perceivable?

So they actually came to us and said, ok, we need to streamline the cloud and get uh data to support what we are asking for it, right? We are asking for budgets. And we need to be able to say, why do we need that? What what value does it bring to the business? And then we need to increase awareness and ownership. We need to get the right information to the right people and we need your help to actually offload some of those tasks. And of course, in the end waste reduction and avoid us. Yeah, they had a feeling that this was happening and they wanted to stop it, stop the bleeding.

So we took that that in and actually started to say, ok, we'll work with you, we'll do a forecast for the whole financial year and then we will help you establish the budget on a bu level. And that strategy was basically to offset the pressure of having dev team teams having to worry about budgets. It's not their job, their job is to build things, to deploy things, to see them working if they really need to keep, oh, this is going to be above or not. This is management. So they could take care, take care of that. And all the teams had to do is basically benchmark themselves against, hey, how was i doing last week? And how am i doing now? Something happened. Ok. Did let me go and see what's going on. So that was the rationale, we needed to educate them about that. And obviously we needed to provide through our manage services, everything they could do and achieve fast or that we could do to offload their tasks and to do so we actually use some technologies aws native services. Yeah. Editing from co explorer, trusted advisor, quick site as you have seen via the cloud health, which is a partner. And it's a great tooling to enable this broadband visibility and allow people to slice and dice information and automations like in slack to really drive communication fast.

So i'm talking about this, but it's actually really nice for you to understand that this is long term and it's easy for me to say, but uh let's hear from them.

Hi, re invent. I hope you've been enjoying this far. My name is kumar aman. I'm head of tech for wcom wean retail group in the netherlands. And i would like to tell you about our achievements that we've made in aws cloud optimizations together with, as michelle just explained, we've made a couple of achievements in optimizing our workload in aws.

One of the first things that we did and that has been very successful is team based monitoring. We output the the data of our monitoring system into schleck to push to the teams. The direct results of our cost optimizations. Every team can then see what their optimizations have become and how they reflect on the total budget that we have.

The second thing is continuous reviews every week, we look at our, at our costs from a management perspective and see how we've been doing this far compared to where we thought we would be, we review teams, but we review services as well to see how we can make more optimizations uh overall per team or as a whole.

There are commitment pitfalls that we've been seeing and that we need to look at if a team wants to use a new service because it is more efficient. We should be aware of the fact that we may have made reservations for another service as well that we then do not use anymore. These are some of the pitfalls that we've been falling into quite frequently and that we are now very aware of.

We focus on scalability because that is very important with the customer demand that we get. Our customers are focused on the late afternoon and evening on our website. But obviously during the morning and night hours, there's not so much traffic at all. We'd like to be scalable so that when the customer visits, he always gets the same experience.

And finally, obviously, we focus on decreasing operational costs as well. We've been acquiring other brands and come up with other brands as well that we'd like to move to our main platform so that we can decrease operational cost by using the cost efficiencies of one global platform.

Our partnership with cb i has made us more cost aware by giving us more insights into costs, but also to challenge us to change the cultural vision on how we look at costs and efficiencies throughout the business, making the costs visible to the teams. For example, by pushing those messages with the slack balls to individual private slack channels of those teams, we've created natural gamification around optimization and that is seen as something fun and challenging by developers and engineers who can celebrate their successes in their cost optimizations and other optimizations with all teams.

I hope you have enjoyed this talk and i wish you a very nice rein event. Goodbye.

So of course, we don't have a lot of time but what they are doing, it's a testimony that actually help and actually is working for them. So instead of looking just as cost, they are looking at the insights that that those costs are bring to them, it's not just about, hey, we are going up and down. It's about what does that mean how the services they they they provide to their customers are being impacted by that. It's about discussing how this can be optimized. It's about making prognosis. It's about making sure that they are running effectively and efficiently. Here is the remaining formatted transcript:

So we achieved many results, right? The vacant tag team is not the biggest, but we managed to train over almost half of them. We managed to achieve actual 27% savings in the in the cloud in the last year. And basically, this is just happening continuously in very fast velocity just to name a few things, we have made reductions in their storage. And those 50% reduction in storage actually brought 44% reduction in the cost with the same business value for them and the same with automation, 63% reduction in monitoring. That's cloud watch guys. It's a lot really. And there are many others.

We have been helping them with managing and automating their commitments where possible. And we have been giving them uh recommendations to optimize the other commitments that we cannot manage for them. And basically we are achieving six figure savings here. It's a lot and they can repurpose that money and do something really whatever they need to do in the rt organization.

But the two most important achievements there are basically talking about the transformation, the knowledge sharing and how this really is ingrained in their teams right now and how this is driving the cultural behavioral change. Yeah. And this is what kon was referring to how devops teams are seen that as challenging as a gamification thing. They don't care about the cause they care about making it better, more efficient and all that is being visible now because all those optimizations actually have a result on their emissions and that's now really visible and they enjoy that some people don't care about the money, but they do care about the sustainability piece of it and making it visible is important.

So it's unfortunate we really do have uh just so so little time. But if you need to take something out of this talk, please take that you need to make things visible. You need to make it really possible for people that have access and the authority to change things to see what's going on. You need to focus on efficiency. It's not about cost. If you make it about cost, you will lose the battle, make it about efficiency. Stay accountable. It's not his or her responsibility. It's yours. Be an example, lead by that drive cultural change. And if you are doing phenoms jump in the boat for greenhouses, they share too much in common for you to leave it on the table. It's easy to get access and to see how one is benefiting from the other.

Thank you very, very much. Thank you for staying at tent and have a great re invent.