When it comes to your cloud estate, building and maintaining a cost-efficient culture that continues to deliver is not always easy. It requires ongoing effort and a culture-wide acceptance of your chosen approach. And it is worth it, just look at the benefits: streamlined operations, available budget for re-investment or development of new services, satisfied customers, and ongoing reliable performance and service delivery.

While there certainly are challenges, they are not insurmountable. This is why I have drafted this blog, looking at the three most common challenges – lack of prioritisation, capability, and governance – what they look like and different ways to overcome them.

Setting the scene

Before I start, it is worth noting that all three roadblocks are linked; they do not exist in isolation. For example, a FinOps team that lacks capability will not prioritise cost-efficient work or cost optimisation, and therefore, its governance function will be ineffective. In the same way, an engineering team that does not have time to prioritise cost-related work will not have the time to upskill meaning they will be losing out on capability. This means they will probably not have visibility of their costs for governance purposes.

Identifying the roadblocks

#1 Lack of prioritisation

There are a number of scenarios where this is likely to happen, including when:

• Teams are focused on application performance and ignore costs – especially if they experience a high frequency of priority incidents that they need to address.
• Your teams do not have the time or resources to work on cost-related activities such as housekeeping and identification and analysis of optimisations.
• Teams cannot see their costs which makes them less of a priority.
• The business goals are not aligned with engineering goals. The business might push for a focus on costs, but engineering teams may feel they need to focus elsewhere, such as application stability, launching new features, etc.

The solution

The key to improving prioritisation is having a team that sees the value in (and the importance of) cost optimisation. This can play out in numerous ways including making sure teams have enough time and or resources allocated to them to be able to do cost-related activities and upskilling – perhaps automating easy optimisations and housekeeping activities to free up time. Another option is the gamification of cost optimisation initiatives or showcasing good work and rewarding success, i.e. shopping or restaurant vouchers based on a percentage of money saved. Other solutions include having a dedicated team (either within FinOps or a third party) that looks for opportunities and is responsible for implementing them, therefore speeding up the process.

#2 Lack of capability

Alongside the lack of prioritisation, engineering teams may lack the capability to undertake cost savings exercises or seeking out opportunities. This may be due to a lack of confidence in making changes or not understanding how to identify the opportunities on their existing infrastructure, both of which can become serious roadblocks. In addition, teams may not understand how to architect cost-optimised solutions while balancing the need for scalability and resilience. There also might be a lack of performance expertise because FinOps alone doesn’t get the organisation to think the same way about performance, cost, usage and value to the customer. And finally, engineering teams might focus on quick wins such as long-term reservations which are helpful in the immediate term but lock away other opportunities behind a one- or three-year window.

The solution

The most obvious solution is ensuring engineers and FinOps teams are continually upskilled in cost optimisation and in identifying areas of opportunity – whether that is through adopting a methodology for sizing of resources or using a third-party expert.

Other solutions include:

• Confidence building – giving engineering teams the chance to conduct the cost optimisation process from identifying the opportunities, through to validation.
• Appointing subject matter experts to keep an eye on the changing market and sharing new information, such as new cost-optimised features released by CSPs, with the team.
• Creating a culture of knowledge sharing – for example, having regular meetings to discuss developments or cost optimisation successes.

#3 Lack of governance

Lack of governance, both financially and technically, can be a major blocker to success. From a financial perspective, FinOps teams become a reporting function of simple optimisations rather than being able to challenge technical teams and find and execute complex optimisations or investigate cost growth. And from a technical point of view, CloudOps teams can make changes, but they do not necessarily know how to identify what to change and will not challenge any changes requested by engineering teams.

Other issues that muddy the waters when it comes to building a cost-efficient culture include:

• Engineering teams not having proper ownership of their product’s cost.
• Poor documentation makes it more difficult to understand product infrastructure and application which leads to lack of confidence in making changes.
• Teams might be reliant on ineffective tooling to bridge the governance gap – such as Cloudhealth – which are useful in as far as they provide dashboards and visibility but not a full governance solution.

The solution

Improving governance starts with ensuring that functions like FinOps and CloudOps are trained in identifying cost efficiency opportunities – both simple and more complex – therefore empowering them to challenge engineering teams. In addition, you can create accountability by making sure all teams have visibility of how much their application costs in relation to budgets, both departmental and organisational.

Other improvements include:

• Making sure reporting tools are set up with the goal of easily tracking and understanding where costs are coming from; taking action based on the data seen
• Set standards for product documentation to ensure it is not a blocker for teams when making cost-related infrastructure and application changes.
• Set reasonable standards through policies such as deployment templates to avoid wastage from oversizing at the beginning.

Moving forward

Creating a cost-efficient culture has long-term sustainable benefits for every organisation – and it starts with being able to identify the cloud cost optimisation opportunities. But what is also needed is buy-in from all teams, from engineering and CloudOps, to FinOps and beyond, as well as the confidence and knowledge to contribute to building that culture. Whether you do it in-house, or turn to a third-party partner to help, creating that cost-efficient culture is possible.

To find out more about our approach to cloud cost optimisation, or to take a deeper dive into how to make it work for your organisation, download our latest whitepaper.