How to practice FinOps with Komiser

Financial Operations (FinOps) is a critical aspect of cloud computing that helps organizations to manage their cloud resources effectively and efficiently. With the increasing popularity of cloud computing, the importance of FinOps has only increased (94% of enterprises overspend in the cloud), as organizations look to reduce their cloud spend and make the most of their investments in cloud infrastructure.

Despite the increasing concerns around cloud costs, there has yet to be a single tool that comprehensively manages and helps to remediate excessive cloud expenses. As a result, teams continue to depend on a mix of native cloud provider tools, third-party platforms, and Google Sheets.

According to the State of FinOps 2022 report, teams are still struggling with the following challenges:

FinOps is a cultural discipline that involves collaboration among finance, engineering, product, and management. The open-source model can facilitate this collaboration and cover the long tail of cloud providers and services. That’s where Komiser comes in as a way to address cloud cost management concerns in today’s multi-cloud environments. It offers insight into cloud resource consumption and expenses, making it a valuable tool for organizations practicing FinOps.

In this post, we'll explore how to use Komiser to empower engineers to optimize their cloud spend while following the FinOps principles.

Cost Allocation

Cost allocation is a crucial component of FinOps. Komiser enables cost allocation to individual projects, teams, or departments, which simplifies the tracking of resource usage and its associated expenses. This information can be used to set budgets, track costs, and identify areas where costs can be optimized. For example, if you see that one team is consistently using more EC2 instances than others, you can work with that team to identify opportunities for optimization.

By utilizing a tagging strategy, you can analyze cloud resource utilization and costs based on specific criteria, such as teams, applications, or cost centers. This approach enables the creation of personalized views that promote accountability for cloud expenses.

This is a great way to show your teams what they’re spending and why and see the impact of their actions on the monthly bill.

Multi-cloud Cost Reporting

As you’re moving to a multi-cloud model, you would need a single place where you can manage all your cloud resources. By integrating with several cloud service providers, Komiser can swiftly generate your cloud asset inventory. This allows you to utilize its powerful filter system to uncover idle resources and wasted costs across all your cloud accounts and regions.

Komiser takes cloud cost management to the next level. Firstly, it gives you visibility into the cloud unit economics that are relevant to you, rather than focusing on a specific cloud vendor. Additionally, it enables you to tag resources across multiple providers and regions using a single interface, which can uncover dormant resources and reduce unnecessary costs.

Komiser provides multi-cloud platform support, including AWS, DigitalOcean, OCI, Tencent, Linode, and Civo, with GCP and Azure support to be added soon. It also supports containerization solutions like Kubernetes.

Uncovering Idle Resources

Komiser provides detailed information on resource utilization, including information on the types of resources being used, the number of resources being used, and the costs associated with each resource. This information can be used to identify opportunities for cost optimization, such as underutilized resources or resources that can be scaled down to reduce costs.

By assigning human-readable labels to cloud resources, teams can use tagging to increase visibility and make smarter budget allocations. With Komiser's bulk tagging feature, tags can be efficiently applied to a group of resources provisioned in various providers and regions without leaving the Komiser dashboard.

With resources being accurately identified by tags, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of your cloud costs, pinpoint resources that are either redundant or aren’t being used, and identify potential opportunities to save money.

Shared Costs Tracking

A key aspect of FinOps is that every team member is responsible for their cloud usage. The calculation of the total cost of ownership requires transparency and accuracy, but unallocated shared costs obstruct these factors. If shared costs are not properly divided, engineers and product managers do not have a complete understanding of the actual cost of their apps. To improve visibility into shared resources such as databases, logging, k8s, enterprise support, etc., developers can categorize shared resources and allocate budget, as well as create custom views that separate these shared resources from the rest of the team's views.

Cost Trends Analysis

It's important to keep an eye on cost trends over time. Komiser provides information on cost trends, including total costs, cost per resource, per team, or tags. This information can be used to identify cost spikes or patterns in resource usage that may indicate an opportunity for optimization. For example, if you see a sudden increase in costs for the frontend team, it may be a good time to review your CDN utilization and see if there are any opportunities to reduce costs.

Komiser cost explorers go beyond native tools like AWS Cost Explorer to provide full-funnel cost visibility across your cloud environment.

Budget Monitoring

In order to stay on top of costs and ensure that resources are being used effectively, it's important to set alerts in Komiser. Slack alerts can be set to notify you when costs reach a certain threshold, or when resources are being used more than expected. This can help you to catch potential cost optimization opportunities early before they become larger problems.

We need your help

Although Komiser can serve as a good starting point for enabling FinOps within your organization, there is still room for improvement in terms of features. We’re collaborating with the open-source community and cloud leaders to work on the following enhancements:

• Automatic resource scaling, right-sizing of instances, RI coverage, and other cost optimization recommendations.
• Forecasting based on past cloud usage to anticipate future demand and identify areas for investment.
• Additional support for cloud providers and SaaS platforms.
• Container cost reporting through OpenCost.

Join our Discord community or visit the Komiser repository to find a good first issue and help us create the future for DevOps where the cloud is transparent and collaborative.

Conclusion

Developing a FinOps culture takes time, but it is essential for creating a sustainable business model. With the right strategy and tools, such as Komiser, you can automate cloud cost management, address complex edge cases, and set higher performance goals. By building a cloud asset inventory, tracking usage and costs, and setting custom alerts, organizations can optimize their cloud infrastructure and make the most of their investments.

Whether you're just starting out with cloud computing or are an experienced user, Komiser is a valuable tool for practicing FinOps and optimizing cloud spend.

Regardless if you are a Developer, DevOps, or Cloud engineer. Dealing with the cloud can be tough at times, especially on your own. If you are using Tailwarden or Komiser and want to share your thoughts doubts and insights with other cloud practitioners feel free to join our Tailwarden discord server. Where you will find tips, community calls, and much more.