STORY OF THE MONTH

When Not Automated, FinOps Can End Up Eating Your Savings

When used correctly, FinOps tooling helps teams optimize cloud resource utilization, demand planning, and consumption modeling.

However, many businesses that use manual cloud cost management tools waste far too much time tinkering. As the cloud computing expert, David Linthicum points out, such “avoidable mistakes end up costing more money than is being saved.”

If you’re looking to dramatically reduce your cloud costs, do these two things:

Check the cost of services and time involved in your optimization strategy.
And start using an automated cost optimization solution that minimizes the time engineers spend on manual configuration.

THE CLOUD IN NUMBERS

Where New Data Centers Grow

Source: Chartr

1 million – this is the number of users ChatGPT reached in just 5 days after launching at the end of November 2022. It took Instagram and Spotify around 2.5 months and 5 months, respectively, to achieve the same.

$300 million – Google invested this sum in Anthropic, which focuses on safety for GenML chat systems.

2 – the number of new massive data center campuses an AWS-affiliated company is planning to build in Ohio.

275 – that’s how many data centers Northern Virginia is home to. They handle a third of the world’s online usage and, according to the Washington Post, causing a stir in the local communities which suffer due to the constant whir of the rooftop exhaust fans.

THE BUSINESS OF CLOUD

The Cloud Repatriation Saga Continues

DHH is back with some more numbers about Basecamp’s cloud exit. The company’s preliminary calculations show that they will save about $7 million in server expenses over five years from the move, without changing the size of their Ops team. Let’s see how this repatriation story continues when the market bounces back…

Source: Hey

Tech companies are radically cutting their vendor costs. Gergely Orosz shows how these cuts are spread between infrastructure tooling (cloud, observability, security), as well as collaboration tools, developer experience, sales, HR, and recruitment.

Source: Pragmatic Engineer

Generative AI is all the rage, but all the users who generate images with DALL-E or write term papers with ChatGPT consume a lot of cloud resources. Who’s going to pay for it? And what about the environmental cost?

The publication argues that companies need to step into AI development projects with a clear understanding of the costs and the impact on sustainability.

Source: InfoWorld

SECURITY & OUTAGES

Kubernetes Adoption Challenges DevOps

The 2023 Kubernetes Benchmark Report is here and shows that DevOps struggle to manage the potential configuration risks coming from new teams adopting K8s. Instead of relying on manual processes for cross-checking policies, teams should automate Kubernetes governance, configuration, and security. The CAST AI Cluster Security report helps exactly in this area.

Source: 2023 Kubernetes Benchmark Report

This had to happen sooner or later - we now have CloudGPT that promises to analyze AWS policies for vulnerabilities. Consider how often ChatGPT gets things wrong before diving in.

Source: GitHub

Brought to you by CAST AI

CAST AI automates Kubernetes cost, performance, and security management for hundreds of companies of all sizes. The platform delivers over 60% cost savings for its clients without requiring months of onboarding to see the results.

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