Skip to Main Content
Cloud FinOps
book

Cloud FinOps

by J. R. Storment, Mike Fuller
December 2019
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
284 pages
7h 38m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Cloud FinOps

Chapter 14. RI and CUD Strategies

Now that you understand the fundamentals of reservations as described in the last chapter, it’s time to ask some tough but important questions:

  • How much should you reserve?

  • What should you reserve?

  • When should you reserve?

  • Who should be involved in the process?

  • How do you know your RIs and CUDs are being fully utilized?

  • How do you know when to repurchase them?

  • Who should pay for them?

  • How do you allocate the costs and savings over the reservation term?

Unfortunately, there are no definitive answers—only the answers that are right for a company at a particular time. Those answers may change considerably as you move through the FinOps maturity curve, as the cloud providers update their ever-changing commitment models, and as your company’s cash reserves change.

Common Mistakes

There are a number of errors that we see companies make when purchasing RIs and CUDs. In no particular order, these are:

  • Delaying purchasing RIs too long

  • Making purchases that are too conservative

  • Buying based on the number of unique instances instead of a waterline

  • Not managing RIs and CUDs after purchasing them

  • Buying too many or too few RIs or CUDs

  • Buying the wrong RIs or CUDs

Nearly everyone gets some part of their early strategy wrong. That’s OK. This is the Crawl stage. You can think of it like learning to ride a bike or writing your first bits of code—it’s a learning process that may take a few tries to get it right.

Failure sucks but ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Cloud FinOps, 2nd Edition

Cloud FinOps, 2nd Edition

J.R. Storment, Mike Fuller
The DevOps Handbook

The DevOps Handbook

Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, John Willis
System Design on AWS

System Design on AWS

Jayanth Kumar, Mandeep Singh

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781492054610Errata Page