To truly reap the benefits of hybrid cloud, organisations must adopt Full Stack FinOps. (Guest blog from NTT Data)

Author: Jon Wood, Senior Director, FinOps and Cloud Optimisation solutions lead, NTT DATA UK&I 

One of our Enterprise clients asked me some months ago whether we could make their private cloud be more like public cloud. What they meant was that they wanted the same easy service provisioning, management and cost transparency they get with the capabilities that have now been developed for their Public Cloud platforms. It’s an aspiration many organisations with large VMWare and Red Hat based private cloud estates may have considered but is seen as a difficult issue to address.  

What is Full Stack FinOps? 

Extending FinOps across the whole of the hybrid stack is achievable and foundations may already be in place where there is an established FinOps approach. 

There are significant benefits but it’s never too early to start with Full Stack FinOps. The sooner you start, the sooner those benefits will be achieved.  

Full Stack FinOps is not only a way to help achieve FinOps for private cloud but can also deliver a holistic view and management capability across all hybrid cloud platforms achieving significant financial and operational benefits to the business. 

Not only that, if you are already on you FinOps journey with Public Cloud much of the foundations for FinOps adoption on Private Cloud are already being put in place. 

Adopting FinOps for Public Cloud cost management has been an active part of NTT DATA’s cloud portfolio since the formation of the FinOps foundation in 2019. Prior to this, our unique approach and experience in cloud cost management has helped our clients save typically between 30 to 50% on their cloud consumption costs. 

When should Full Stack FinOps be adopted?  

As many organisations move services to public cloud and deal with the challenges of managing consumption-based charging with a FinOps approach, the disparity between public cloud and private cloud becomes greater. Higher levels of automation, cloud native management, provisioning capabilities and better cost transparency in public cloud are areas that private cloud implementations are typically falling behind. 

Addressing the disparity between public and private cloud management capabilities is fundamental to applying the benefits of FinOps holistically across hybrid cloud. 

The capabilities to establish a FinOps approach for Hybrid Cloud are achievable with less effort than many organisations think and start with: 

• Allocating costs to services 
• Alerting on cost anomalies to allow intervention on unexpected usage patterns that generate higher usage and therefore cost 
• Automating optimisation changes such as rightsizing so that they are rapid and risk free 
• Shutting down workloads when they are not used to reduce the overall compute and power consumption requirements (workload management) 

Skilled and experienced System Integrators are helping to achieve these capabilities and more across a FinOps Framework. 

The NTT DATA approach to FinOps on Private Cloud has identified that there are two key gaps that must be addressed. 

1.  Cost definition and tracking: Private Cloud costs must be defined in a catalogue to determine the real cost of services. This can be linked to metadata on Private Cloud resources to understand the cost of individual services running on Private Cloud 
2. Forecasting: The forecast model in Private Cloud is fundamentally different to Public Cloud. Defining a realistic forecast model that takes in to account the buffer of Private Cloud capacity and the effects of FinOps optimisation to pack services in to a reduced hardware footprint is required 

Full Stack FinOps Outcomes 

The following outcomes can be achieved from this approach:

• Optimising Private Cloud reduces the hardware and software footprint required to run services 
  • Releases spare capacity 
  • Permits hosting of additional services without extra investment 
  • This can release CAPEX for other investments 
  • In the short term spare capacity can be switched off to reduce power and CO2 emissions 
  • There is the potential to repurpose spare capacity for other uses, for instance creating container capacity to support modernisation of monolithic applications 
• More efficient usage of a Private Cloud also leads to 
  • Cost avoidance, less CAPEX is required to run the same services 
  • Potential to extend the lifetime of assets if they are repurposed for other uses such as application modernisation 
  • A positive sustainability impact
    • Powering off unused hardware 
    • Packing services on to less hardware is more efficient than running a higher number of less utilised compute instances 
• There is an opportunity for tools rationalisation and efficiencies in areas such as DevOps and infrastructure automation 

There is no time like the present.

Extending FinOps across the whole of the hybrid stack is achievable and foundations may already be in place where there is an established FinOps approach. 

There are significant benefits but it’s never too early to start with Full Stack FinOps. The sooner you start, the sooner those benefits will be achieved.  

If you’d like to get started with Full Stack FinOps and an understanding the benefits you can achieve with our FinOps Assessment, please contact us.