How can I reduce monthly cloud hosting costs using FinOps practices?

All answers to this question.

You don't necessarily need a whole new team to start, but you do need a cultural shift. The first step I always recommend is "Tagging." If you don't have a strict resource tagging policy, you can't see which department is spending the money. Second, look for "Orphaned Resources"—things like unattached EBS volumes or idle Elastic IPs that are just sitting there draining your budget. Third, move your predictable workloads to Reserved Instances or Savings Plans. I managed to cut a client’s hosting bill by 35% in just one month simply by cleaning up these idle resources and right-sizing their EC2 instances.

   Answered 2024-04-20 by Susan Clark

Are you using any automated tools like AWS Cost Explorer or third-party platforms like CloudHealth to track this, or are you trying to manage the spreadsheets manually?

   Answered 2024-05-15 by David Wilson

• David, manual spreadsheets are the fastest way to lose track of cloud hosting costs! I highly recommend starting with the native tools first. AWS Cost Explorer is quite powerful now for identifying daily spend anomalies. If you want to get serious about FinOps, look into "Rightsizing" reports which tell you exactly which servers are over-provisioned. Most engineers pick a larger instance than they need "just in case," but that safety net is costing your company thousands every month.

     Commented 2024-06-05 by Matthew Moore

Spot Instances are the ultimate "hack" for non-critical hosting tasks. You can get up to 90% off the on-demand price if your application can handle interruptions.

   Answered 2024-07-12 by Mary Harris

• Spot instances are great, Mary! We use them for all our background processing and dev environments, and the hosting savings have been absolutely massive for our startup.

     Commented 2024-07-25 by Robert Taylor