Hi and welcome back to my blog
It's roughly two years since I last blogged, and during that
period, I've been busy with family and personal matters. But today I got some time
to spare and share
As cloud engineers, platform engineers, or simply "cloud magicians" such as myself, we've seen the shift: more workloads in the cloud means more to manage. And yes, with that comes more cloud consumption.
Increased workload equals increased consumption and it does to some extent. With a new mindset, however, comes FinOps.
What is FinOps?
FinOps is an operational framework and cultural practice which maximizes the business value of cloud and technology, enables timely data-driven decision making, and creates financial accountability through collaboration between engineering, finance, and business teams. (https://www.finops.org/introduction/what-is-finops/)
As we are able to appreciate the cloud's scalability and
elasticity, we should also be cautious with costs. Non-prod environments are
ideal for this kind of optimization for the following reasons:
1 . Multiple Environments of “Non Prod”
Most companies have multiple non-prod environment (SIT, UAT,
PreProd)
2. Internal Use Only
These kinds of systems are typically internal-facing, and
therefore scheduled downtime after work hours does not impact end-users.
3. Freedom to Experiment
You can try out optimization methods without committing your
App teams or affecting production workloads.
The Goal: 🠟 Wastage 🠟 Cost
1. Run Only During Working Hours
Instead of running services 24/7 (730 hours/month), I
reduced this to roughly 180 hours/month (Mon to Fri, 9 AM to 6 PM).
2.1 automated the start and shutdown of the environment through scheduled pipelines
2.2 no manual intervention needed with cron job like 0 9 * * 1-5 or you can set the time if your automation tools support that.
Since the automation is pipeline-based, there is full transparency. The teams can look back in history to confirm what was triggered, when, and by whom (or what) this goes to App Team , FinOps Team and Cloud team in some cases.
Sample calculation
With breaking a bit of sweat because of try and error for this pipeline and try to get the right parameter and command , cost can be reduce up to 75 % .
so if you are running service like Application Gateway and Azure Database for MySQL , you may try this Azure Command
1 . https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/network/application-gateway?view=azure-cli-latest#az-network-application-gateway-start
2. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/mysql/flexible-server/how-to-restart-stop-start-server-cli#start-a-stopped-server
Or Make an API CALL
1. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/application-gateway/application-gateways/start?view=rest-application-gateway-2024-05-01&tabs=HTTP
2. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/mysql/flexibleserver/servers/start?view=rest-mysql-flexibleserver-2024-06-01-preview&tabs=HTTP
Apart of this , if your organization strive for ESG on Cloud, this might help also , i have not deep dive into that but let see 😁
