Cloud FinOps, 2nd Edition

Chapter 21. Automating Cost Management

When you have a repetitive task that needs to be performed often, automation removes the effort and maintains consistency. Within FinOps there are plenty of opportunities to automate. In this chapter, we’ll take a look at some of the commonly automated FinOps tasks and the benefits and challenges of automation.

FinOps automation as a term can mean many different things, ranging from simple bill processing to direct infrastructure management, including processing of billing data, anomaly alerts, report delivery and creation, reserved instance or savings plans management, tagging/account/subscription/project creation and hygiene, usage optimization and rightsizing, stopping and starting of resources on a schedule, predictive autoscaling based on demand, choosing instance sizes on deployment, migrating workloads between spot and on-demand, or delivery of cloud spend data to external systems, etc.

Your definition of automation will depend on your company’s cloud and FinOps maturity, its staff’s technical abilities, and your general comfort level with moving repetitive processes from humans to computers.

Whether to Automate

To automate or not to automate? That is the question. You can determine the answer by looking at two aspects of your organization. First, you must outline the outcome you want to achieve with automation. Second, you need to compare automation to a manually tracked process within the organization and determine whether automation ...