Continuous infrastructure optimization: A cornerstone to a successful FinOps strategy

The Cloud Financial Operations (FinOps) discipline aims to understand and manage cloud costs while maximizing the value from cloud investments. While controlling cloud spend remains a key business objective, focusing FinOps efforts primarily on visibility and cost-cutting doesn’t get to crux of the problem and may even snowball into bigger issues – especially given the growing complexity of the cloud and the stakeholders involved in managing it. Cutting cloud costs without fully assessing the impact on infrastructure may disrupt applications and services that are critical to the business. Given the scale, complexity, and workload demands of multi-cloud environments, gaining a cost- and performance-optimized infrastructure is critical for a successful FinOps strategy and the business.

Driving successful FinOps strategy with Spot Ocean

Organizations scaling on Kubernetes are facing challenges like soaring infrastructure costs complexity and limited visibility into infrastructure usage and costs. With infrastructure a key component of any FinOps strategy, addressing these challenges is critical for FinOps success. To overcome these challenges, operations teams, like DevOps and Platform Engineering, need to be able to continuously see, understand and control their infrastructure usage and costs.

Spot Ocean delivers continuous optimization of public cloud containers and Kubernetes infrastructure. Ocean’s customizable automation and monitoring helps maximize infrastructure efficiency and availability while minimizing costs. With Ocean, cloud operations teams can focus on workloads and applications, rather than managing the underlying infrastructure.

Ocean has many capabilities that make it the most comprehensive solution for optimizing containers and Kubernetes infrastructure for both cost and performance. A few months ago we announced the availability of automated rightsizing, which reduces waste, by ensuring that applications have the compute resources they need, not more, not less. Now, at re:invent 2024, we’re introducing even more value including ways to reduce infrastructure costs, drive cost-efficiency with commitments utilization, as well as gain deeper visibility into infrastructure usage and costs.

The faster you scale, the more you reduce costs

Infrastructure availability and costs can be impacted by the effectiveness of scaling resources to respond to workload needs. Scaling needs to be at the right time, with the right resources, less susceptible to interruptions, to ensure the application’s availability as well as avoid unnecessary costs.

Ocean’s new autoscaler responds immediately to scaling events to ensure that Kubernetes clusters always have the infrastructure they need to meet workload requirements. To avoid massive interruptions, Ocean distributes nodes while keeping the costs as low as possible. Fast scaling together with node distribution method balances cost reduction without compromising on availability.

Ocean responds in real-time to workload changes to drive optimal resource allocation and performance.

Get more from your commitments

One of the popular ways organizations can reduce cloud infrastructure costs is to purchase specific compute capacity in advance – i.e. commitments. However, effectively utilizing these commitments can be challenging in a dynamic compute environment. Underutilization and sub-optimal coverage of commitments generates unnecessary compute costs and forgoes savings opportunities since there is no native way in Kubernetes to dynamically adjust usage of commitments for more optimal utilization, there’s a risk of provisioning on-demand or spot Instances, leading to unnecessary costs.

When scaling, Ocean’s new dynamic commitments utilization feature continuously manages provisioning of available Reserved Instances (RI) and savings plans (SP) to optimize usage and minimize waste, during both infrastructure scaling and replacement events. Ocean constantly monitors both the effective use of existing RI/SP and on-demand (OD) usage in the account, as well as RI/SP coverage. Ocean analyzes which instances can be replaced with spot instances or a different RIs or SP and replaces them as needed to improve utilization, coverage and cost. This minimizes commitments waste since RI/SP can be utilized by different workloads, and reduces costs and usage of unnecessary full price OD or spot instances.

Reduce unnecessary costs by ensuring commitments are fully utilized before provisioning on-demand or preemptive instances.

More visibility means better decisions

To drive optimal business decisions, operations teams need deeper visibility into their cloud infrastructure. Visibility is the first step in understanding how various optimization activities affect usage and costs. But trying to understand how infrastructure optimization influences costs and usage can be daunting even for experienced practitioners. Workloads – especially those running on containers and Kubernetes – are never static and always fluctuating in their demand for resources, which makes it hard to follow and gain insights from.

Ocean collects a wide range of metrics on Kubernetes and containers infrastructure and presents this data to users through comprehensive, user-friendly dashboards. These dashboards track progress over time and offer a clear view of the customer’s infrastructure cost-efficiency and cost savings achieved by using Ocean. With Ocean’s new autoscaler dashboard, operations teams can get deeper visibility to understand the variety of optimization activities taken by Ocean, such as scaling up/down, revert to spot/commitments and other types of optimizations performed on the infrastructure information needed to drive the right operational and purchasing decisions to ensure application performance and availability at an optimal cost.

Enable data-driven decisions and improve budget management through real-time, detailed insights into infrastructure optimization, utilization and costs.

Get a cost- and performance-optimized infrastructure

These new capabilities further enhance Ocean’s positioning as leading solution for optimizing containers and Kubernetes infrastructure, and driving FinOps success.

To see Spot Ocean in action and share your infrastructure optimization challenges with us schedule a customized demo today.