What's new in Cloud FinOps?

Send us a textAbout this podcastSteve and Frank are back with the latest cloud FinOps news for October! This episode covers the following topics:AWS Fault Injection Simulator now injects Spot Instance InterruptionsAWS Pricing Calculator now supports Amazon CloudFrontIntroducing Amazon EC2 C6i instancesAWS Marketplace announces Purchase Order Management for SaaS contractsAmazon EC2 announces attribute-based instance type selection for Auto Scaling groups, EC2 Fleet, and Spot FleetIntroducing GKE image streaming for fast application startup and autoscalingRun your fault-tolerant workloads cost-effectively with Google Cloud Spot VMsN2D VMs with latest AMD EPYC CPUs enable on average over 30% better price-performanceFind your GKE cost optimization opportunities right in the consoleGoogle Cloud billing tutorials: Because surprises are for home makeover shows, not your walletFind out more about Cloud FinOps by visiting our website.

Send us a textSteve and Frank are back with the latest cloud FinOps news for September! This episode covers the following topics: Amazon Redshift extends Automatic Table Optimization to support Column Compression EncodingAWS Cost Categories introduces Split Charge rules for allocation of shared costsAmazon MSK adds metrics for increased visibility of capacityAmazon Textract Updates: Up to 32% Price Reduction in 8 AWS Regions and Up to 50% Reduction in Asynchronous Job Processing TimesAmazon Elastic File System introduces Intelligent-Tiering to automatically optimize storage costsAmazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering – Improved Cost Optimizations for Short-Lived and Small ObjectsGeneral availability: Azure Files supports storage capacity reservations for premium, hot, and cool tiersPublic preview: Scale-down mode in AKSGeneral availability: Lower capacity reservation tier for Azure Monitor dedicated clusters AWS CodeBuild now supports a small ARM machine type Amazon RDS now supports T4g instances for MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL databasesNow auto-terminate idle EMR clusters to lower costVisit our website to find out more about cloud FinOps.

Send us a textAfter a bit of a delay caused by holidays, covering holidays, surgeries and the day job, Frank and Stephen are back to talk you through the summer's news on Cloud FinOps.This month there's no main topic as there was so much interesting news and Frank and Stephen chatted far too much!Here's the topics they covered:azon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/07/aws-lowers-data-processing-charges-aws-privatelink/ https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/developers-practitioners/optimizing-your-google-cloud-spend-bigquery-and-looker https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/pick-the-google-cloud-region-with-the-lowest-co2 https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/blog/deliver-scalable-costeffective-disk-storage-for-azure-vmware-solution/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/07/aws-allows-customers-pay-their-usage-in-advance/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/updates/public-preview-of-azure-database-for-mysql-flexible-server-now-offers-reserved-instance-pricing/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/updates/general-availability-azure-backup-now-supports-archive-tier-for-backups-of-sql-server-in-azure-vms/ https://azure.microsoft.com/updates/dcsv2-vms-pricing-reduction?WT.mc_id=acm-micflan https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-ec2-m6i-instances-powered-by-the-latest-generation-intel-xeon-scalable-processors AWS Announces General Availability of Amazon EBS io2 Block Express Volumes https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/updates/general-availability-azure-spring-cloud-pricing-model-change/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/06/amazon-ec2-inf1-instances-new-features-improved-performance-and-lower-prices/ 

Send us a textToday, Frank and Stephen talk through the news (largely from late May - early June) and then discuss what could be built using Free Tiers granted by AWS.  The next two episodes will look at Free Tiers in Azure and then GCP (we're going alphabetically).In the news:[AWS]  -  https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/06/identify-and-copy-existing-objects-to-use-s3-bucket-keys-reducing-the-costs-of-server-side-encryption-with-aws-key-management-service-sse-kms/[AWS]  -  https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/06/announcing-per-second-billing-for-ec2-windows-server-and-sql-server-instances/[AWS] -  Announcing Amazon Kendra Smaller Units and Price Drop [AWS] -  https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/05/new-self-paced-courses-for-cloud-procurement-NET-and-amazon-codeguru-available/ [AWS] -  https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/05/ec2-high-memory-instances-to-12tb-memory-available-additional-regions-with-on-demand-savings-plan-purchase-options/ [AWS] - edited out due to low FinOps relevance (also Steve didn't really understand it)  https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/05/amazon-emr-now-supports-amazon-ec2-on-demand-capacity-reservations/ [AWS] -   https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/05/aws-compute-optimizer-enhances-ec2-instance-type-recommendations/ [GCP] - THIS IS REALLY BIG!  https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/google-cloud-introduces-tau-vms  [Azure] -  https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/updates/dcsv2-vms-pricing-reduction/ [Azure] -  https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/updates/five-more-free-services-available-with-an-azure-free-account/ In terms of the Free Tiers we look at what's possible in the "Always Free" services and then in the "Free for 12 months", it's a lot easier with one of them, but I'll let you see which!

Send us a textHello everyone!This month we have lots of exciting things to tell you about!  Frank and Stephen have gone through the top FinOps stories from the major vendors and tell you what you need to know.We also dig into the new AWS Application Cost Profiler which begins to help on the journey to cost per user from shared resources.If there's anything else you'd like us to talk about for next time let us know!

Send us a textWhat's new in Cloud FinOps Episode 7 hosted by Stephen Old and Frank Contrepois.This month we go through what's new in Cloud FinOps from the last month and are joined by Strategic Blue's Financial Solution Architect, Jon Bryant, who explains our FinOps Framework.

Send us a textWhat's new in Cloud FinOps Episode 6 hosted by Stephen Old and Frank Contrepois.This month we go through what's new in Cloud FinOps from the last month, before delving in to different ways to forecast and the pros and cons of them.With Cloud FinOps accelerating and more people asking us about how best to embed it into their organisations we've started with some basic topics (like forecasting this month) and looking at how Cloud may change them compared to traditional IT procurement.

Send us a textThis month we run through the rather limited news in FinOps this month, before Stephen and Frank dive in to their favourite things from Re:invent. Frank focusses on deep dive technical services such as:AWS CloudShell – Command-Line Access to AWS Resources (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-cloudshell-command-line-access-to-aws-resources/)New for AWS Lambda – Container Image Support (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-for-aws-lambda-container-image-support/)New for AWS Lambda – 1ms Billing Granularity Adds Cost Savings (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-for-aws-lambda-1ms-billing-granularity-adds-cost-savings/)Introducing new Amazon EBS general purpose volumes, gp3(https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/12/introducing-new-amazon-ebs-general-purpose-volumes-gp3/)New – Amazon S3 Replication Adds Support for Multiple Destination Buckets (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-s3-replication-adds-support-for-multiple-destination-buckets/)[Amazon S3 Update – Strong Read-After-Write Consistency (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-s3-update-strong-read-after-write-consistency/)While Steve runs through some of his favouritely named services and things he's been speaking to people about:Introducing AWS SaaS Boosthttps://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/12/introducing-aws-saas-boost/Introducing AWS Audit Managerhttps://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/12/aws-announces-aws-audit-manager/Introducing AWS Panoramahttps://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/12/introducing-aws-panorama-for-computer-vision-at-the-edge/Introducing AWS Protonhttps://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/12/amazon-web-services-announces-aws-proton/Introducing AWS IOT Edukithttps://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/12/introducing-aws-iot-edukit/CURs at the Member Account levelhttps://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/12/cost-and-usage-report-now-available-to-member-linked-accounts/If you have any suggested topics please let us know what you'd like to hear about next!

Send us a textToday we have a quick look through what's new in the past month in Cloud FinOps followed by a special guest segment.Our special guest is Jon Bryant, Strategic Blue lead Financial Solutions Architect (FinSA).  Jon runs us through the most interesting things we saw in 2020, any trends they may suggest and how things have impacted cloud in the past 12 months. Then we look forward into 2021 and how the new chip releases may impact the cloud market.

Send us a textIn this Episode we welcome our friend and Strategic Blue Teaming Partner Dario Ferrer, founder of DFTek.  After Steve and Frank go through the news from the last month Dario tells us about how he managed to reduce cost and increase efficiency of a set of cloud functions to create an impressive saving for one of his projects.