FinOps for AWS

The cloud offers companies unimagined opportunities, but also harbours the risk of uncontrolled costs. With FinOps for AWS, you stay in control and utilise the full potential of the cloud without exceeding your budget.

FinOps (Financial Operations) is an innovative approach that combines finance, technology and business. The goal: to optimise cloud costs while maximising business value. With FinOps for AWS, you gain control over your cloud spend while accelerating your digital transformation.

As an experienced managed service provider, we support you in optimising your AWS cloud infrastructure.

Our proven FinOps approach includes:

1. "Pay Less" rate optimization: This includes the improvement of discount programmes over one-year or three-year terms as well as the in-depth analysis of your spending patterns and your readiness for long-term subscriptions. The goal is to develop a customised strategy to make the most of discounts.
2. “Use Less” eliminate unnecessary waste: This includes removing unused resources such as orphaned disks, snapshots and more, adjusting oversized virtual machines, merging databases and fine-tuning object storage classes.
3. Enablement: This includes sharing knowledge of key measures to optimise cloud spend, establishing performance metrics and procedures for effective governance, and best practices for internal collaboration between central IT and application owners.
4. Implementation planning:This includes the creation of an executive summary with recommendations, structured discussions on individual measures and the definition of responsibilities.
5. FinOps organizational consulting: Consulting on possible courses of action with regard to organisation, IT guidelines, tagging, and tooling.

FinOps success stories

A FinOps checkup with PCG and the introduction of FinOps in the company brings many advantages. The following use cases impressively demonstrate this potential:

Use Case 1: Unutilised resources

In an industrial company that has been using cloud resources for more than five years, hundreds of unnecessary snapshots and dozens of unused hard drives were identified through script-based analyses. As a result of these measures, savings of over EUR 4,000 per month were achieved, which corresponds to an annual saving of around EUR 50,000.

Use Case 2: Unmanaged discount programmes

In a digital service provider that has been using cloud resources for more than five years, the discount programmes were not optimally aligned with the requirements of product development. This resulted in potential annual savings of around EUR 80,000.

Use case 3: Overprovisioned VMs

In a medium-sized company, internal customers were allocated more resources than were actually required. A savings potential of EUR 8,000 per month could even be realised in the short term, which corresponds to around EUR 25,000 over the year.

FinOps using the specific example of AMD

When companies venture into the cloud, this usually starts with setting up virtual machines (VMs) to run their workloads on the selected cloud platform. A key aspect of optimising computing costs is to carefully evaluate the price-performance ratio.

Choose the right CPU for your VM

When running your cloud workload, you have the freedom to choose the type of physical CPU. This decision can have a measurable impact on performance and costs. By choosing a CPU with a favourable price/performance ratio, you can achieve immediate cost efficiencies.

For example, C3D VMs powered by 4th generation AMD EPYC™ processors deliver up to 45% better performance and improved performance consistency over previous N2D VMs, with up to 360 vCPUs and 2.8TB of memory per VM.

In addition, running your workload on a more powerful CPU can result in a shorter runtime, saving on ongoing computing costs. When evaluating VM types, it is crucial to ensure that the underlying CPU matches the requirements of your workload.

Our aim is to help you select a flexible solution that offers a comprehensive range of functions while ensuring a good balance between customisability, performance and total cost of ownership (TCO).

By switching from N2D to C3D, general VM customers can save an average of 26% on their VM operating costs (across five typical workload benchmarks), reducing their overall cloud spend or opening up the IT budget for high-demand features such as Data & AI Services.