{"id":35224,"date":"2019-10-31T22:03:02","date_gmt":"2019-10-31T19:03:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/prohoster.info\/blog\/skolko-vy-tratite-na-infrastrukturu-i-kak-na-etom-sekonomit\/"},"modified":"2019-10-31T22:03:02","modified_gmt":"2019-10-31T19:03:02","slug":"skolko-vy-tratite-na-infrastrukturu-i-kak-na-etom-sekonomit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/prohoster.info\/en\/blog\/administrirovanie\/skolko-vy-tratite-na-infrastrukturu-i-kak-na-etom-sekonomit","title":{"rendered":"How much do you spend on infrastructure? And how can you save on it?","gt_translate_keys":[{"key":"rendered","format":"text"}]},"content":{"rendered":"

\"How
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\nYou have probably wondered how much the infrastructure of your project costs. Interestingly, the growth of expenses is not linear in relation to loads. Many business owners, CTOs, and developers subconsciously realize that they are overpaying. But for what exactly?<\/p>\n

Usually, cost reduction boils down to simply finding the cheapest solution, an AWS tariff, or, if we are talking about physical racks, optimizing hardware configurations. Moreover, this task is often undertaken by anyone willing to take it on: if we are discussing a startup, it\u2019s likely handled by the lead developer, who has their hands full. In larger companies, this responsibility falls to the CMO\/CTO, and sometimes the CEO personally gets involved with the CFO. In general, these are the people who already have a lot on their plates. Consequently, infrastructure bills continue to rise, but those who are supposed to address this issue are the ones who don\u2019t have the time to manage it.
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\nIf the office needs to purchase toilet paper, the office manager or a responsible person from the cleaning company will take care of it. When it comes to development, it's the leads and the CTO. Sales is clear too. But since the days when a 'server' referred to a cabinet housing a regular tower system unit with a bit more RAM and a couple of hard drives in RAID, everyone (or at least many) has ignored the fact that purchasing resources should also be handled by a specially trained person. <\/p>\n

Unfortunately, historical memory and experience indicate that this task has been shifted onto 'random' people for decades: whoever was closest to it just picked it up. Only recently has the profession of FinOps started to take shape and gain some concrete definitions in the market. This is the specially trained individual whose job is to oversee the purchasing and utilization of resources, ultimately aiming to reduce the company's expenses in this area.<\/p>\n

We are not advocating against expensive and effective solutions: each business must decide for itself what it needs for comfortable operation in terms of hardware and cloud pricing. However, one cannot ignore the fact that thoughtless purchases \"by the list\" without subsequent monitoring and usage analysis can lead to significant losses for many companies due to ineffective management of their backend \"assets.\"<\/p>\n

Who is FinOps<\/h4>\n

\nLet\u2019s assume you have a solid enterprise that salespeople breathlessly refer to as an \"enterprise.\" It\u2019s likely that, \"by the list,\" you\u2019ve bought a dozen or so servers, AWS, and a few other things \"on the side.\" This makes perfect sense: in a large company, there\u2019s constantly some movement\u2014some teams grow, others disband, and some transfer to neighboring projects. And this combination of movements, along with the \"by the list\" procurement mechanism, ultimately leads to new gray hairs when reviewing the next monthly infrastructure bill. <\/p>\n

So what should you do\u2014patiently grow gray hairs, cover them up, or figure out the reasons behind those numerous horrible zeros on the bill? <\/p>\n

Let's be honest: getting approval, authorization, and direct payment for a request within the company for the same AWS tariff is not always (in reality\u2014almost never) a quick process. And precisely because of the constant corporate movement, some of these purchases can get \"lost\" somewhere. And simply sit idle. If a diligent admin can notice an orphaned rack in their server room, with cloud tariffs, it's much sadder. They can sit \"on the sidelines\" for months\u2014paid for, but at the same time no longer needed in the department for which they were acquired. Meanwhile, colleagues from the neighboring office start tearing their hair out\u2014not just on their heads but in other areas\u2014as they haven\u2019t been able to get approval for a similar AWS tariff that they desperately need for weeks.<\/p>\n

What is the most obvious solution? Right, pass the reins to those in need, and everyone is satisfied. But horizontal communication is not always well established. And the second department might simply not know about the resources of the first, which has turned out to be less necessary for them.<\/p>\n

Who is to blame? \u2014 To be honest, no one. That's just how things are set up for now.
\nWho suffers from this? \u2014 Everyone, the entire company.
\nWho can fix the situation? \u2014 Yes, indeed, FinOps.<\/p>\n

FinOps is not just a bridge between developers and the equipment they need, but a person or team that knows where, what, and how well things are positioned in terms of the cloud tariffs purchased by the company. In fact, these people should work hand in hand with DevOps on one side and the finance department on the other, serving as an efficient intermediary and, most importantly, an analyst.<\/p>\n

A bit about optimization<\/h4>\n

\nClouds. Relatively cheap and very convenient. But this solution stops being cheap when the number of servers reaches double or triple digits. Moreover, the cloud allows you to use more and more services that were previously unavailable: including databases as a service (Amazon AWS, Azure Database), serverless applications (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions), and many others. They are all great in that they are easy to use \u2014 just buy and go, no hassle. However, the deeper the company and its projects dive into the cloud, the worse the CFO sleeps. And the quicker the CEO is going gray.<\/p>\n

The thing is, bills for various cloud services are always extremely confusing: you might receive a three-page breakdown for one item detailing where, what, and how your money was spent. This is certainly nice, but deciphering it is practically impossible. Moreover, our opinion on this matter is far from unique: there are entire services dedicated to translating cloud bills into human language, for instance, www.cloudyn.com<\/a><\/noindex> or www.cloudability.com<\/a><\/noindex>. If someone has gone through the trouble of creating a separate service for bill breakdowns, then the scale of the problem has exceeded the cost of hair dye.<\/p>\n

So, what does FinOps do in this situation:<\/p>\n