FinOps
We find where AWS is spending the money, cut what is waste, and put in the controls that keep cost from climbing back.
Cutting the bill once is the easy part. With no cost assigned to an owner, no budget with an alert and no standing review, spend returns to its old level within a few release cycles.
Outcome
The goal is not just to cut the bill. It is to make cost part of the decision.
What we do
The work starts by understanding the cost and ends by leaving the control inside the operation.
Native AWS tooling covers most of the ground, and there are cases where a third-party platform such as nOps delivers allocation, commitment automation and Kubernetes visibility with less assembly work. The recommendation comes out of each client's case, and RSA Tech holds no resale relationship with any of these tools.
Visibility with an owner
We organize cost by account, service, environment and business dimension using cost categories and cost allocation tags, and analyze it in AWS Cost Explorer, over the detailed AWS Cost and Usage Reports data delivered through data exports. Cost without an owner is managed by nobody.
Waste diagnosis
We identify idle resources, wrong sizing and expensive service choices, with support from AWS Cost Optimization Hub, separating immediate savings from what requires an architecture change.
Commitments based on real usage
We evaluate Savings Plans and reservations against observed consumption. The wrong commitment trades variable waste for fixed waste.
Automated controls
AWS Budgets with alerts routed to an owner, Cost Anomaly Detection switched on, and thresholds that fire while the month is still open.
Cost as an architecture requirement
What we learn here feeds back into foundation and operations decisions, so spend becomes part of the architecture design.
How we work
There is no point saving this month and handing the money back over the next few. That is why the work does not end at the cut.
We map what the account is paying for
Before suggesting any saving, we trace where each line comes from, because half of what looks like waste is somebody's deliberate decision.
We separate waste from architecture decisions
Idle resources go quickly. Cost that comes from the design is raised as an architecture proposal, with the impact stated.
We ship the control with the cut
Every saving delivered comes with the mechanism that prevents its return: a budget, an alert, a policy or an allocation.
We put the number in front of whoever decides
Cost per product, team or customer, at the granularity the decision needs.
We leave the process inside the company
With the review ritual and dashboards in place, the team tracks its own cost, answers for its area budget and stops drift before month end.
AWS services and tools involved
- AWS Cost Explorer
- AWS Cost and Usage Reports
- Data exports
- AWS Cost Optimization Hub
- AWS Budgets
- Cost Anomaly Detection
- Cost categories
- Cost allocation tags
- Savings Plans
- nOps
- AWS Organizations
- Terraform
Where we usually come in
The bill grew faster than the business
Multi-account environments where nobody can confidently explain what is driving the increase.
Cost needs an owner
Companies that need to understand and allocate cost per product, team or customer to make pricing, margin and budget decisions.