Cloud FinOps

Chapter 17. 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.

What’s the Goal of Automation?

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 is a better method to achieve the desired outcome you’ve identified.

What Is the Outcome You Want to Achieve?

It’s important to identify an actual outcome, not just the way that automation will achieve that outcome. For example, if you take another look at idle resource governance, you could be forgiven if you think the goal is to remove idle resources from your cloud environment. But in reality, the outcome is that you want to remove these resources because they’re costing you money. This is important, because you use such goals to measure the performance of your automation. If you measure the raw number of resources turned off—since they’re identified as idle—you won’t see the real impact this has on your cloud bill versus when you measure the costs avoided by shutting these ...