Recent research by Forrester found that IT leaders expect that their cloud costs will grow exponentially in the next two years, with nearly 72% of these leaders noting that their cloud costs exceeded their budget in the last fiscal year. The compute power required to support cloud, generative AI, and more is growing, so the fiscal and environmental costs associated with these technologies can quickly get out of hand.
As Discover migrated its technology ecosystem to a container-based cloud platform, the need to optimize cloud costs was quickly apparent. Three ways we were able to realize over $20M in savings this year was a heightened focus on collaboration, communication, and clear guidance to our technologists.
Collaboration between technology & finance
The first step to better manage our cloud spend and usage was to strengthen the partnership between architecture, development, operations and finance.
Enter GreenFinOps, a cross functional team and operational framework responsible for driving increased governance, accountability, transparency, sustainability, and optimization across the company’s cloud ecosystem. The green in GreenFinOps recognizes the fact that we consider the environmental component of our cloud costs as well as the fiscal costs.
At Discover, this looked like implementing regular touchpoints between the teams where we were able to create requirements that accounted for technology and finance needs, agree on overall goals, and communicate with each other about how our teams were doing with meeting those goals.
Collaboration between finance and technology gave both teams a view into what applications and environments were costing Discover the most—and what could be done to optimize these specific areas. "This collaboration fostered a sense of unity and cohesion, creating a culture of accountability and shared responsibility that helped us achieve better results," said Mike Fitzpatrick, VP of Line of Business Finance.
Strategic communications to cloud users
Communication was a key part of reducing our cloud spend. To that end, we created a dedicated website where we could communicate about the program with all employees, post events where people could learn more, and introduce the tools we wanted teams to use to track their cloud spend.
We implemented dashboards that showed a real-time view of our cloud usage and spend, so that teams could adjust, as necessary. We are currently building new proprietary systems that enable us to leverage our internal data more effectively. "Being able to clearly communicate in real time about our cloud usage added a level of transparency and accountability that spurred teams to right-size their usage," said Marlene O’Neil, Vice President of Infrastructure Services.
To help foster greater awareness and educate teams on the new optimization opportunities available, GreenFinOps facilitated regular events for upskilling and held weekly office hours to answer people’s specific questions.
Clear guidance about tools, reporting & architecture
Finally, offering teams clear guidance about the tools we expected them to use and specific ways we wanted them to set up their environments was crucial to reducing spend.
We upgraded to new monitoring and alerting tools that helped us track our cloud usage and got executive buy-in to move teams to these tools. Then we offered a series of upskilling events, tutorials, office hours, and more to ensure teams were using the tools effectively.
We are updating our guidance for architects to think about cloud usage and costs during the strategy and architecture phase of development. To that end, new applications and environments were created that optimized usage and costs from the design phase through to implementation.
"Ensuring that all of our architectural designs are fiscally and environmentally viable is a key tenet in our design approach. We have a fiduciary responsibility to manage costs while ensuring equitable consideration of environmental impacts during every step of the development process. As part of this approach, we ensure that cloud costs are considered when building a new architectural solution," said Ed Calusinski, Vice President of Architecture and Technology Strategy.
New guidance for operating in the cloud continues to be published and distributed where applicable. For example, we’ve given clear guidance on selecting the appropriate type of processors which helps optimize our cloud consumption, while updated cloud metadata tagging standards strengthen our compliance posture.
Conclusion
Collaboration, communication, and clear guidance have been the cornerstone to our GreenFinOps approach at Discover. We not only reduced our cloud costs, but we also improved our container-platform efficiency and strengthened our security posture by cleaning up unused deployments and namespaces. While we’ve achieved incredible results with our optimization efforts, we know that additional research, collaboration, and testing will show us new opportunities for optimizing our cloud usage and spend.
