New CFM Tips | The Keys to AWS Optimization | S9 E3

hello welcome guys nice to see you both hope you're doing well and nice to see everyone watching we are excited to chat all about CFM tips today so we're going to be talking about the new set of labs guides you guys are going to explain about how you can optimize and before I forget I need to remind everyone at the end of every episode we have Richard who is going to be summarizing points from the episode so that you guys can see kind of what we were talking about so you could you want to remember

any of the points so make sure to stick around till the end to watch that but how are you guys doing Judith how's your day going hi Steph thanks for having us here actually it's the end of the day for us so it's good the weekend is starting oh I love it that's the weekend is starting wait what day is it yeah yeah Thursday Thursday so yeah oh oh of course oh fair enough I was like hang on a second am I streaming on the wrong day the slight Panic anyways all right that's uh let's

get into it so welcome everyone to the keys to ad best optimization the show where we share stories Concepts and solutions to help you unlock your spend at AWS my name is Steph G and I'm a senior optimization Advocate and today we're going to be talking about CFM tips so ways for you to save money which I'm super excited to get into one thing before we start the ACT short content the episode I just wanted to highlight I think we ched on here before about this but we are on Spotify now so if you are

listening to us on YouTube or watching us on YouTube then that is great but you can also check us out on Spotify so if you are um working online and want to listen or if you are wanting to just listen on a walk which is what I did the other day I listen to my own episode to learn something uh then you can do that so make sure you check that out but let's get into it so let's do our one minute origin story from my my lovely guest uh Judith do you want to kick

us off yeah sure so hi everyone my name is Judith lener I'm a senior technical account manager based in Israel I'm also part of the cloud intelligence dashboard group and also leading the CFM tips nice Shak yeah hi I'm sha Holzman I'm a technical account manager I'm also based in Israel and I'm not part of the uh cloud operations uh group but I'm helping with to my amazing customers with their Cloud journey and cost optimization activities amazing and there's some comments in the chat welcome people watching live got uh Hey ten from Dublin loving it

I know that this guy's in Dublin too uh so loving to see some listeners let us know in the comments where you're watching from uh sometimes we get some Americans sometimes we get Europeans so feel free to comment so talking about optimization so let's get into what we're actually talking about what is this subject today do you guys want to give us a kind of high level view of what is this Cloud financial management tips and where can people start with it sure so uh Cloud financial management technical implementation playbooks or you can call it

shortly CFM tips is a self-service Workshop that is built to help you um implementing cost optimization activities in your organization uh basically phop practices and in this Workshop we provide you with technical actions that you can take and you can um start working in optimizing different Services we also provide information about how you can visualize your cost your spend and usage in AWS as well as how to monitor your cost and of course how to control it amazing hitting on some key buzzword right from the start optimization visualization love it so where where did this

come about from jul I don't know if you want to go for that one yeah so we started working on this two years ago almost and the idea was to create one place that will hold all the cost optimization best practices that we as technical account managers found when working with our customers so we just want to have one place that can guide us and our customers great so these are all stories from real customers or techniques that customers have actually used which as know about you makes it so much more real and I'm sure

when you look at the website and we're going to demo the website in a bit you can actually see that in a lot of the things I often feel that when you are creating content or guides sometimes you can tell when it's a bit more theoretical and sometimes you can tell when it's a bit more lived in h so before we jump into the demo Who are the target audience for these kind of optimizations so I think that many many different people can benefit from CFM tips but um I think the the ones that will

benefit the most will be phop practitioners devops engineers and Cloud Architects nice so it covers like a nice range of people that can over there so if you're watching it and you're any of those roles uh you can go and check out the site and we'll pop up the link to the site in a second so um last question when should they start using this is this like a preemptive stuff is it a Azure deploying when do you guys recommend people start checking out this site so that's a great question that we're being asked several

times and we say when you start your Cloud Journey you should go over the different pillars and learn how you can benefit from it but even a customer that is very mature in the cloud they can use the CFM tips to optimize a specific service or specific areas that they want to focus on amazing right let's stop delay let's actually dive into it and there's the link so you can go and check out below let's do a demo of what this thing looks like and it's a similar format just to throw back to an episode

we did about Microsoft optimization two weeks ago similar kind of format with these guides to help you and we're doing a lot of these sessions at the moment because there are so many questions we asked from customers about how they can optimize and rather than it be a one-on-one basis like these guys have said we want to Ed as many customers as possible and so that's why we're creating and highlighting these so let's have a look all right do you want to take us through what we've got here then yeah sure so let's go over

the different pillars that we have so when you will open the link that we shared you will get to the homepage and here we are explaining what is CFM tips how it connects with Cloud financial management in in general it's the technical implementation of the CFM uh different concepts and in CFM tips we have four pillars and we will go over them so the first one is a cultural change and under cultural change we talk about how you connect between the finance and the fops with the engineering team in order to create a more cost

aware culture inside the organization and we are using the well architected framework best practices in order to find the right places and in order to create this environment so that's the first step when you start uh talking about cost optimization and creating a cost aware culture after that we will go into foundations and Foundation talks about all the basic guardwell that you need to put yeah that you need to put when you start talking about cost optimization so we are talking about setting up budgets in order to control and monit monor your cost how you

should use cost anomaly monitors to identifies anomalies and spikes and how important is to use tagging strategy to get better visibility into your different environment different projects and we also share how you can use trusted advisor cost optimization recommendations in order to identify either resources or underutilized resources and lastly will explain how to enable compute Optimizer because we will use it later on in the Playbook Spiller so before we move on to from from to our next pillar so in these ones in the well architecture the links on the right hand side do they take

you to documentation about these Concepts or are these ones that you use with like the guidance of Workshop studio so it will take you to the white papers of the well architected all the concept and how what's the best practice to do that and if we want to give just one example so if I'll go into set of budgets then we can see we explain which tool we have today so we have the AWS budgets and we explain which kind of budgets you should Define so we recommend to define a all services budgets a monthly

budget and a daily budget and we also show in a video how you can do it step by step because maybe you are not familiar with that ah okay and you know what I'm going to quickly throw a poll up just before we dive into the next bit because I'm I'm intrigued to know if people have heard of Workshop Studio before we kind of because we haven't really covered what this is so in the chat if you have heard of one Workshop Studio One for yes two for no um let us know just because I

feel like this is a really useful place to get guidance and I don't actually know if many customers have heard of it people are okay got some twos in got some ones bit of a mix I think all the people who who I know uh who work at Amazon probably do know what it is but the people outside don't which is interesting okay more people know than I thought which is great I'm glad I'm glad I'm glad those people know all right sorry let's go back to uh to the demo so now with this so

continuing on with foundation so we've done the culture we understand kind of some best practices around that topic area and then some foundations which is kind of making yourself your set up for success and enabling stuff um let's go on to the next one so visualizations yeah so visualizations will focus on visibility into the AWS cost and usage so the first tools that we will use is cost Explorer the first place that you will go when you want to start understanding your cost in usage but we also have the cost and usage report which is

the most granular report that will give you information about specific resource and hourly granularity and and lastly the data export that was released at reinvent which is a cost usage report the new version that also have integration with quicksite and creates a a dashboard that gives you visibility so it's a very cool new feature that was released and the last one here is a one of my favorites Cloud intelligent dashboards which holds a group of dashboards that was created also by technical account managers and the idea was to create a better visibility into different ER

usage and environments in AWS and you will see when we go into the playbooks how we use the cloud intelligent dashboard in in order to get visibility into different cost and usage awesome and there's always a bit of a running gag in this show about how early in the show we mentioned the dashboard so always good to have a nod here and was I say oh in case anybody's joined um kind of in between we're talking all about the new CFM tips if you have any questions comments guys put them in the chat if you

have any specific questions about optimization maybe we could even show you in here where you could find an optimization recommendation for a service of your choice Okay so we've got all of our data what's next okay so next one that I really want to highlight is the Playbook Spiller and the playbooks pillar when I stay on this link we can see the full list of playbooks meaning the full list of services that we cover today we have more than 30 services that we cover today and it's a technical Playbook so you can see the different

domains and every domain we have different playbooks so under your database you can see all the different playbooks that we have I will take for example RDS and for every Playbook we have several topics and it will always start with General spend I will show it shortly so we always want to start with how you can identify the spend of a specific service so that's why we always start with General spend and then we will go into different topics but we try to keep a top- down approach meaning we will try to reduce idle resources

reducing the waste optimizing the different resources and at the end we will talk about commitment plans where it's relevant so an RDS for example we are talking about how to identify ideal instances how you can move to graviton do right sizing to your instances maybe use instance scheduling in order to stop your development environment when you don't need them and then optimize storage in backups so that's the full Playbook and we encourage you to use it step by step so I will show an example Steph any questions yeah yeah yeah before you do I say

we have a question which is can people submit suggestions for new playbooks yeah we are looking for that suggestion you can see our email here so we are looking for the feedback we have a feedback here that will be a form that you can fill or just email us and let us know what you think if you think that we're are missing a important playbooks or important topics that you want to get information about we would love to hear it awesome all right well pop the the link to the email below love that um we've

also had uh love love how verose the content is for the various playbooks uh agreed there's and I love the order it's very structured so if you're new and you're thinking like ah I've seen the RDS is high in my spin what do I do I do like this idea that it's kind of guided and also the estimate because I think sometimes people we take for granted maybe an off inops world uh that it's very easy to I think oh of course these are the things but if you're newer to the cloud you might not

realize uh that is the email below if you guys want to get in touch and make sure to mention that you saw us on Keys that's how we want to know if you have any feedback or ideas around uh The Playbook so yeah continue go for it uh into your example yeah so I just want to highlight what you said it's very important we really try to to keep it simple the idea behind the different playbooks to keep it h short actionable and simple as much as possible okay so let's talk about General span so

on every topic we will have the overview that explain about the specific topic here it's just a general spend for RDS but then how you can identify it with a different tools so here is how you can identify it with scus dashboard so we explain which tab you need to go into and which filter you need to to do on the appropriate place and then what is the name of the visuals that you should look for in order order to get visibility into RDS cost by a product family so this is how you get visibility

with scus but we also explain how you can get visibility with cost Explorer which filters you need to put in order to get this specific visibility so this is very important part that we have in every topic so this is one example just before to the visibility paff I was gonna say sh when you're working with customers do you often see them ask these kind of questions about what which tool can I see things in they often look for this kind of guidance yeah so cost Explorer is great but sometimes we are looking into more

depth information that we can only get with C or with kudus so of course we recommend to use it and I think with CFM tips to understand all the options you have to view your span and usage on AWS it's a great place to start uh ID identifying your your cost yeah cool okay all right so we seen the cost then where do people go okay so they can continue with the different topics I will show another example that is interesting so this specific topic is not just how to get the visibility but also how

to get the guidance to optimize the specific usage so when we are talking about graviton for RDS so graviton is a Arm based processor that will give you a better price performance and we are explaining here in the overview what is graviton 2 about the different instances that we have in graviton 2 the different instances we have in graviton 3 and which versions of RDS support this kind of instances that's really the basic thing that you start thinking should I move to graviton well I need to find out if my version supported that's the first

thing you need to do but but after that after you you understand what is graviton then how you can identify on kudus which workload you can move into graviton so you get you get this visibility with this specific Visual and kudus but we also explain how you can do it by using the cost Explorer which filters you need to put in order to understand if your workload is is fit for moving into graviton and on every topic we will also put some guidance which is the best practice is how you can optimize it and we

try to keep it short and actionable awesome um we just had a question in the chat so I'm going to thr this one up I think this is going to be uh so it's kind of on the topic but it's more about the actual things you're showing on the screen um so let me take this down so B easier to read um so is there some sample Cur data in your Workshop as this is a great demo great demo from what I know it's not possible to have the sample data in cost Explorer the question

is how are you able to have screenshots or examples from the content from CFM so I can kind of jump in first but then if you guys want to add a thing from what I understand what we've done to make the Kudos dashboards demo available is we have made kind of fake data so that could be people spinning up stuff in their accounts to kind of create this and we've aggregated it together and then used it to make the dashboard so I'll and shout out to I think Yuri and the guys uh for doing a

lot of this work I sometimes use that that example data um so there's not one that Amazon has on offer that I believe uh because we kind of want you to look at your own accounts rather than use a demo but that's kind of where it comes from I don't think you can create any kind of demo uh Cloud sorry cost Explorer but maybe a follow-up question to this person is what do you w to demo like what are you looking to do with this information but have you guys got any other things you want

to say about this question yeah so I can share that for kudu specifically for the different dashboards we have a demo link that people can play with it but for cost explore is a challenge and we have something but it's internal there we go so yeah so maybe the yeah throwback a question let me know or also if anybody as per has any questions or wants to a more detailed conversation feel free to email us at Cost optimization amazon.com but yeah kind of what do you are you doing internal demos at work and you want

to do something then yeah check out the card intelligence dashboard for that but uh to continue on sorry they go back on to to the guidance yeah so that was another example how you can just pick a specific topic if you want to move to graviton as an example and go over the guide over here perfect so let's let's get into um some maybe I'd love to know with these kind of things what is your favorite kind of optimization recommendation in here because this is what we asked the the guys doing the Microsoft session everyone

has a favorite optimization trick or something they have and I can even share one of mine so um yeah Judith what's your favorite optimization uh recommendation in here so my favorite is RDS charge backup it's something that we learn that customer are not aware all the time so basically when you provision a instance then you get the same amount of of backup storage without additional pricing but if you save more data then you will start paying for that so customers are not aware of it uh so we you we we created this Playbook to explain

about it how they can identify it with cost Explorer how they can search for charge backup and see if they have any of these specific charges and then how they can optimize it and moving it maybe to S3 or just delete snapshots that they don't need so this is my favorite ones ah so it it's I don't know this one I love learning new things uh so this one is more around if you have sorry just to confirm you have an RDS and it will automatically start taking backups and you're paying for those is that

what you mean no this is for the manual this is from creating manual snapshots that you don't delete and oh okay okay classic the snapshot's getting here the same as an EA yes um okay cool what sh what about yours yeah so for me it's in in cloudwatch so judyth maybe you can show it as well so in cloudwatch uh logs specifically so lots of people are not aware that with cloudwatch by default uh logs keep kept for um unlimited time and the most basic thing that you would want to do is to set retention

to your logs it's very straightforward yes easy to miss so this is why this is my favorite so like in other um playbooks that we've seen we have the information about how to identify this uh uh usage and cost and then explanation about the log retention so it's very simple but most of the customers are not aware that their their logs are just kept indefinitely so the costs are keeping on growing yeah yeah yeah the um Cloud watches as many people on the show who watch um no I love to talk about Cloud watch optimization

there's some great episodes on the YouTube channel to go and check out to see more about them and also with the new with the there's a new log tier so if you do want to keep the logs but don't necessarily want to keep them uh you do want to keep them forever but you don't want to pay as much you could out new log here I think maybe we need to add that as a as an extra thing in here I always love adding new ones um I would also like to shout out one that

I like and I love an idol resource that you can get rid of my question do you need that is always common so in the networking I believe you guys have got idle um uh idle n gateways is that in there yeah yeah perfect yes I know here it is this was yeah this was something I always find fascinating especially because the way you identify in Kudos is is just clever so when you're paying for it there's and please guys correct me if I've if I've Miss say anything uh you're paying for like a kind

of deployment charge that's like running once a month and then you also pay for the data and if there's no data it looks like you're not using it and so that's how we identify that it's idle uh this is done for a few different services in a similar way but I just love this very like clever way of using the costom usage report to identify this kind of thing because your it's the same you can do the similar kind of things with that workspaces where you can look for what you're paying for the workspace but

not actually using it so it gives you lots of ways to find new ways to delete resources that you no longer need okay is there anything else want to highlight in the workshop studio um before we before we close out on this demo I think there are several common use cases maybe just that we wanted to to explain the customers uh are using uh so first of all is uh in EBS so migration from gp2 to gp3 um yeah so um this is one of the first steps that customers will take in their Cloud optimization

journey in AWS um so gp3 are the latest uh generation of general purpose SSD based EBS volumes and we give information about the migration we explain how to find uh the relevant usage and costs and of course we provide guidance like we saw previously and in the guidance we reference to other external resources if it's blogs or if it's documentation because like Judith mentioned at the beginning the goal of CFM tips is to consolidate uh the cost optimization activities that you can perform in AWS in a one place so it's like a One-Stop shop for

AWS cost optimization activities but we still want to use um existing resources whether it's other workshops or blogs or documentation so we reference them uh in our Workshop after providing a short explanation about process and what customers need to do in order to optimize awesome the I wonder it would be interesting uh maybe just for us offline to to know if you have which which Tabs are getting access the most because it would be interesting to learn and it let let me know guys because maybe that shows a demand and we can do an episode

on the the top subjects that are coming up um right with the last two minutes I just want to do a quick one last poll um so I'm I'm curious we did an optim we did a goal setting session last week with um John and I I want to know do you guys out there have a goal to save money at the moment because this constantly changes whether people uh do so one for yes two for no um if you have a goal in your organization to save money because it seems like sometimes it is

a big thing and sometimes it's more about setting up so people commenting one okay good it's it's still it's still a common challenge that people are are kind of looking out for which is good I just wanted to to just sense check someone's put like 10 ones in that they definitely optim okay awesome okay good to know oh someone said no okay well good maybe they're setting up a phup strategy okay with that um we will get ready to do our summary so Richard can bring up his his final summary of the tips but I

just wanted to say thank you so much for sharing guys so cool I hope everyone goes and uses this demo that that site to kind of learn more about optimization okay so our episode summary CFM tips is the One-Stop shop for optimization yes it is covers four pillars culture foundation visualizations and Playbook simple and actable guides for all users even me now Richard knows I read this out so that's for me it's either for him or it's me but he could say anything and I just read these things out so that's brilliant okay that is

it from us um thank you so much for watching this episode of key best optimization we hope you enjoy it next week we're going to be talking about the brand new Google dashboard for the C dashboards which is super exciting uh thank you so much for coming on guys really appreciate it and we'll see you all next time thanks bye