„Honey, I shrunk the cloud bills” – 5 Learnings after a Cloud Cost Reduction Project

At one point, in every company there will come the time, where the focus is on cost reduction. It might be found in different (less obvious) wordings and the reasons may vary. Yet, the goal is the same: Spend less money! While it should always be in a company’s focus to work economically reasonable, it is sometimes pushed even more than usual. 

One year after the cloud migration

We migrated all our applications in the cloud until October 2021. What we learned along the way, Simona Orlandi summarized in this article: Migrating to Cloud: 8 Learnings 

In fall 2022, one year after the migration, BurdaForward looked at the overall cloud spending and decided: “we need to reduce the cost”. 

With this opinion, we are - of course - not alone: 
 

According to the Cloud Maturity Report by HashiCorp from 2022, 94% of companies report unnecessary cloud spend. Sadly, as you can see in the current Cloud Maturity Report this number has not changed. 

How to start your cloud cost reduction journey?

Well, I can’t speak for everyone. But I can tell you how I, Lea, portfolio manager at a central cloud infrastructure team did. 

Find out here where I failed, where I succeeded and what learnings I was able to gain.

Step 1: “The Task”

In fall 2022, I was entirely new to BurdaForward, starting my position in the central cloud infrastructure team.

Being the newbie in the team, I was surprised to be assigned the task of cloud cost reduction – what a huge topic. Also, it seemed like a pretty boring one to me. And with that opinion, I seemed not to be alone. New features needed to be developed, other topics had priority. 

This already leads me to Learning #1: The Task

Someone needs to say the task out loud “We need to reduce our cloud cost”. Ideally someone from higher management or even the C-suite.

Step 2: “The Concept”

Being new to the company, I needed all the input I could get. So, I talked to a lot of my dear Cloud Engineering colleagues. There seriously couldn’t have been a better starting point for me! 

With a lot from our infrastructure team’s help, we put together a concept, what goals to set and how to achieve them.

Each of the goals was explained in detail in a chapter. Writing down goals and especially non-goals helped a lot to define a scope. 

To summarize our concept in 3 bullet points

• “Cost Awareness”: Make product managers & team leads aware of their cloud spending à more prio for cost reduction measures
• “Knowledge Sharing”: Show developers how to implement measures for cost reduction à implementation of measures
• “Cost Busters”: Launch a cost consultation unit à support where needed during implementation of measures

This leads me to Learning #2: The Experts

Find someone who knows their way around in the cloud infrastructure but also knows how the company works. 

Step 3: “The Attention”

With that, I had a lot of input, but I struggled with the question: How am I going to sell this to the company? As I said before, even I initially had some prejudices: “Ugh, reducing cost in the cloud is so boring”

So, I took my chance and went on stage to present the topic at our annual central BurdaForward tech conference “TechForward” in winter 2022.

I presented how much we are currently spending in the cloud, where we had just migrated one year ago. Also, thanks to my dear Cloud Engineer colleagues, I was able to estimate how much we could save with – mostly – easy measures. 

This amount of money that we can save, I had the audience guess. Eventually I presented that it’s around the price of a small house, which is how I (think that I) got everyone’s attention! 

These – mostly – easy measures were:

Trainings for our teams:

• “Cost Awareness”: Showing product managers & team leads how to see their cloud spending
• “Auto-Shutdown” – Teaching developers how to turn off non-productive environments at night or during the weekend, when they are not needed
• “Instance Switch” – Showing developers how to find the right types of machines in the cloud for their use case
• “Right sizing” – Teaching developers how not to use too many resources in the cloud 

Some central measures:

• “Zombie Hunt” – find applications that are still up and running, although they are not needed anymore, so practically idling around undead, like a zombie.
• A central (virtual) team that evaluates cloud cost and usage per teams and approaches the contact persons to share their advice. As you will find out later, we called them “Cost Busters”

! What needs to be added at this point is that a lot of central measures were already in place at BurdaForward and thus not mentioned in this conference. These should still be considered when you want to start your own cost reduction journey: Usage/Savings Plans and Reserved instances to get discounted resources in the cloud.

I also made sure to point out that this initiative is not only about decreasing the cloud cost, but also a great opportunity to increase cloud knowledge. So, a Win-Win for all.

This leads me to Learning #3: The Attention

I learned about the importance of awareness after that conference. A single application might not generate the biggest cost. But every application within a company combined will sum up quickly cost-wise. When everybody does their part of cost reduction, be it only a few $ per month, it will be noticeable looking at the bigger picture. After my talk at this conference I felt a lot more cost awareness already, even before our first trainings.

Step 4: Trainings

As the central Cloud infrastructure team, we offered 3 trainings in our BurdaForward Academy:

• Cost4Leads: A cost awareness session that taught how to see an application’s cloud cost
• jAWS I: How Auto-Shutdown can reduce your cloud cost by 20%
• jAWS II: Fun-Size your cloud (cost)

Since every single training would be topic enough for an own post, I will only show one example about Auto-Shutdown.

In this second training, we provided scripts to our dev colleagues and showed them how to implement “Auto-Shutdown” in their own cloud resources. The goal was to shut down unused environments at night. We estimated that we could save ~1/5^th of our entire cloud cost by this.

This leads me to Learning #4: Trainings

Trainings are not only a good way to show devs how to reduce cost. They are also an opportunity to strengthen the tech community. I enjoyed meeting a lot of colleagues and bringing them together to tackle one big goal: the cloud bills.

Step 5: Central Expert Team

Let’s have a look at what happened since my talk at the “TechForward” in November ’22:

Nice Success

• Knowledge: We, the central cloud infrastructure team, offered 3 training sessions
• Easy Measures:
  • 20 zombie-accounts were found and shut down
  • Around 80% of the teams at BurdaForward use “Auto-Shutdown” for at least one of their applications 
• Cost Monitoring: We report the overall cloud cost to the c-suite & contact teams with surprising cost increase which we discover via a central cost anomaly detection

More difficult than expected

• Keeping the cost awareness high is an ongoing struggle
• Not every team has the (dev) resources to implement cost reduction measures
• Seeing whether the overall cost has de-/increased is very tricky in a fast-changing environment like ours. New projects get launched, others die, prices change, etc.

So my final Learning #5 or rather the tl;dr version of the entire article: Central Expert Team

What I learned in these past 1,5 years is that a central team is necessary to keep the overview of the big picture. Awareness needs to be kept high, cost needs to be monitored continuously. Expecting every single team in a company to do this is not realistic. Ideally, a central (finOps) team would be founded to not only raise awareness & promote measures but even implement these together with teams. 

I need to highlight that although it wasn’t the easiest task, I am happy that I was chosen to lead that project. It was an incredible opportunity to get a deep understanding of our cloud infrastructure!

In the end, I think it is safe to state “Honey, we shrunk the cloud bills”.