AWS Cloud Cost Reduction is a hot topic 💰📉: in this blog post we will talk about how democratizing visibility and shifting left best practice validations can foster shared cost responsibility.

What is cloud cost reduction? 

Across industries, cloud computing has become a more popular choice in recent years. Cloud-based operations are becoming increasingly popular thanks to their scalability, flexibility, and ease of use.

However, one of the biggest challenges of cloud computing is managing costs. As anyone can quickly spin up new resources, the usage of AWS cloud resources grows, and so does the cost of using those resources. This can quickly become overwhelming for teams and eat into the budget for other vital projects.

Nowadays, FinOps is a hot topic since organizations are looking for ways to reduce expenses and OPEX. FinOps is an evolving cloud financial management discipline and cultural practice that enables organizations to get maximum business value by helping engineering, finance, technology, and business teams to collaborate on data-driven spending decisions.

In most organizations, this culture is driven by centralized "FinOps" owners that act as guardians and look to optimize costs across the organization. While this is an extremely valuable practice, without sharing the responsibility and allowing the engineering team who operate and own cloud services to truly understand and troubleshoot costs, reducing costs will continue to be a complex undertaking requiring many cycles and the effort of many functions.

As an industry, we should strive to share responsibility and foster ownership of costs among the teams that use cloud services.

Making the case for democratizing cloud costs 

Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem: shifting left and democratizing cloud cost troubleshooting.

Shifting left refers to addressing AWS cloud cost problems as early as possible in the development cycle. By doing this, organizations can identify and resolve cost issues before they become major problems.  

Democratizing cloud cost troubleshooting means giving all team members the right tools and visibility they need to understand cloud costs and help identify areas for optimization and unintended expenses. As well as the ability to troubleshoot cost spikes with context.

The benefits of shifting left and democratizing cloud cost troubleshooting are numerous. Firstly, it helps to prevent cloud waste. By addressing cost issues early on, organizations can reduce the amount of unnecessary AWS cloud spending. Secondly, it enables organizations to identify and resolve cost issues faster, which leads to improved efficiency and better cloud cost management overall.

Finally, it helps to build a culture of cost awareness across the organization, which can lead to a more proactive approach to AWS cloud cost management.

Roadmap to democratized cloud cost management

Organizations need to invest in the right tools and processes to shift left and democratize cloud cost troubleshooting.

Firstly, they must ensure that their AWS cloud billing and cost data is easily accessible and understandable to all team members. This may involve using cloud cost management tools that provide detailed insights into cloud usage and cost and clear and concise attribution to the actual services each team runs.

Secondly, organizations should invest in AWS cloud cost optimization training for all cloud practitioners. This will help build a culture of cost awareness and ensure everyone can contribute to cost optimization efforts.

In conclusion, shifting left and democratizing cloud cost troubleshooting is the key to reducing AWS cloud costs and improving efficiency quickly. By implementing the right tools and processes and fostering a culture of cost awareness, organizations can take control of their AWS cloud costs and ensure they are getting the most value from their cloud investment.

How Lightlytics can help

Existing solutions (native tools and legacy FinOps vendors) completely miss the context of resources in your environment and the activity that generates usage costs. A solution to this problem did not exist for DevOps teams, so we created one!

By using Lightlytics, companies across industries can democratize cloud costs and enable their cloud practitioners to easily understand, attribute, troubleshoot, and optimize AWS cloud costs, as well as shift left the validation of cost best practices to the build stage when using Terraform.

By using Lightlytics internally, we were able to dramatically reduce costs quickly, find unused resources, unnecessary cross AZ traffic, and detect unwanted spikes with ease. After a month of use by the entire team, cost became top of mind.

Similarly, we've received great feedback on our cost capabilities from our customers. Multiple customers reported they were able to reduce up to 25% of their AWS bill by having the DevOps and SRE USE our platform for extensive search and cost troubleshooting.

- See how you can democratize costs using Lightlytics.

- Learn how to validate cost best practices at the build stage using Terraform.