Despite the fact that FinOps is a relatively new approach to cloud management there is a wide range of FinOps adopters among SMB and enterprise companies. All of them have started their journey with an aim to get the most out of cloud adoption.
Big names among FinOps adopters
You can easily recognize such big names among FinOps adopters: Airbnb, PayPal, Starbucks, The New Your Times, Twitter, Yelp, Shopify, Atlassian, NBCUniversal, etc. They are representatives of various industries, and they offer absolutely different services to their customers but all of them choose implementation of FinOps principles in order to provide the best services and ensure cost-efficiency of IT spends.
Cost visibility and control, cloud bill reduction and reasonable consumption of cloud resources are the main goals of the majority of IT teams among small companies and corporations.
Needless to say that cloud vendors such as Amazon Web Services, VMware, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft are a giant part of the FinOps community. Offering exceptional services to their customers, they also give instruments to implement FinOps in your company – CloudHealth (by VMware), AWS Cost Explorer and Azure Cost Management. Using cloud-native solutions and your internal resources you can create an efficient cloud infrastructure.
Success stories of FinOps adopters
Experience of different companies proves that it is possible to:
- optimize usage and costs by using Savings Plans and Actionable Cost Data on AWS, like Airbnb. Airbnb achieved visibility improvements, reduced storage (Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering) costs by 27% and get 60% reduction in their Amazon OpenSearch Service costs
- reduce GCP costs up to 25% , improve engineering quality and platform stability by using cost metrics, like Vendasta – one of Canada’s fastest-growing companies with a platform providing B2B products and services in the marketing and advertising space
- cut cloud costs by 28%, decreased cost of 96% of compute resources and assign cost ownership of all AWS accounts, like Alert Logic – a company providing a platform to protect businesses across the globe from cybersecurity threats
- avoid idle resources, like TicketSwap – one of the largest European ticket exchange sites, who suffered from great swings in customer activity depending on the calendar. They don’t need to pay for unused compute and storage capabilities anymore
- achieve 42 % reduction in compute costs with the help of committed-use discounts and other optimizations opportunities, like Etsy – a global marketplace, serving more than 2.8 million sellers
- create more cost-aware consumption and cut cloud costs by 30%, like MicroStrategy – business analytics and mobility platform that helps enterprises to transform their business
- сut сosts by 40% in 6 months using AWS native services and internal tools, like Lyft – a ridesharing services provider in the US and Canada
- save over $100,000 a year, like Intuit – financial platform for both personal and business goals, headquartered in California
- reduce Amazon EC2 spend per unit by 45%, like Wildlife Studios – Brazilian one of largest mobile gaming company
FinOps is an ongoing process
The key to success doesn’t depend on the size of your company, industry or budgets spent on cloud services. Starting implementation of these simple FinOps principles that we’ve covered earlier (Visibility, Control, Collaboration, Cloud Cost Optimization) you’ll definitely optimize your spends, create a more agile workflow and improve governance.
A huge range of available free and paid solutions make it affordable and possible. Don’t try to copy strategies of other companies mentioned above. You should consider and take into account best practices but remember the fact that there is no universal solution and FinOps is not a one day task. It’s a process of close collaboration among different teams who are not used to working together and sometimes don’t fully understand each other’s needs.
If you have already reached your cloud optimization goals, feel free to share your story with us and join the ‘FinOps in practice’ community on LinkedIn.
Nick Smirnov, FinOps and digital transformation enthusiast, CEO at Hystax
