What this book covers
Chapter 1, FinOps Foundation, defines FinOps so that all readers have the same foundation as they progress through the rest of the book. You will understand the origin of FinOps, as well as its purpose. You will understand the definition of FinOps, the entities responsible, the importance of the discipline, and how to set the foundations for doing so. In other words, it explains the who, what, why, and how of running FinOps on AWS.
Chapter 2, Establishing the Right Account Structure, discusses strategies for organizing AWS accounts allowing you to use AWS Organization for consolidated billing, volume discounts, reserved instance sharing, and others. Everything in AWS starts with the AWS account: this includes cost optimization. You will understand the benefit of consolidated account management in terms of governance and resource management.
Chapter 3, Managing Inventory, teaches you to take an inventory of all your assets now that you have the right account structure in place. This chapter teaches you how to use AWS tools to take inventory, produce reports, and identify anomalies. It also provides guidance on different tagging strategies to have a sustainable inventory-tracking policy.
Chapter 4, Planning and Metrics Tracking, teaches you to baseline your spend. You need this data in order to see where you can reduce waste, and find opportunities for optimization. This chapter teaches you how to use Cost Explorer to see your usage, create reports that can be tracked over time, and set up policies and goals to know how well you are performing to reduce waste.
Chapter 5, Governing Cost and Usage, emphasizes that with inventory, metrics, and baselining in place, you must now know how to govern your usage so that costs do not deviate from expected spend thresholds. You will learn how to use various AWS Management services such as AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, and AWS IAM to govern your account’s spend. You will also learn to tag their resources properly so that you can track resource use effectively.
Chapter 6, Optimizing Compute, covers compute, the most popular use case for customers. You will learn how to choose the right pricing model for your workload. These options are reserved instances, Savings Plans, Spot, SageMaker Savings Plans, and on-demand. You will learn to use AWS Compute Optimizer to rightsize their instances. You will also learn about serverless offerings to maximize efficiency.
Chapter 7, Optimizing Storage, examines another core component of IT: storage. You will learn how to optimize your storage use. You will learn the different storage tiers in S3 to optimize storage costs, including S3 Storage Lens. You will also learn how to optimize on the database services including Amazon RDS, Amazon OpenSearch, Amazon EFS, and DynamoDB.
Chapter 8, Optimizing Networking, discusses the last core IT component: networking. You will learn how to analyze and optimize on data transfer costs. You will also learn to use VPC endpoints to reduce bandwidth costs wherever appropriate for your workload. You will also learn the different hybrid networking architectures and learn how to conduct cost analyses to choose the optimal solution.
Chapter 9, Optimizing Cloud-Native Environments, covers optimization topics beyond compute, networking, and storage. You will learn how to use rightsizing and elasticity such as auto-scaling to maximize the efficiency of your AWS usage. You will learn different autoscaling policies and strategies, and learn which to use for a specific workload. You will also learn to use Trust Advisor to see other opportunities to optimize.
Chapter 10, Data-Driven Fin-Ops, explains that cost optimization is not a one-time activity. You must continually monitor, report, and act upon FinOps best practices at scale if you intend to maximize the benefits. This chapter shows ways to automate reporting and response to adopt a CI/CD practice toward FinOps.
Chapter 11, Driving FinOps Autonomously, goes through different ways individual teams can incorporate FinOps best practices in their daily operations. While the previous chapter focused on FinOps practices centrally, this chapter essentially teaches you about FinOps practices that also need to be managed de-centrally or autonomously. This provides you with the full spectrum of everything you can do to reduce waste from both the top-down and bottom-up perspectives.
Chapter 12, Management Functions, brings together the concepts of the previous chapters to teach you how to integrate both centralized and de-centralized FinOps practices. This will close the gap between all that you have read and bring everything together.