Chicago FinOps first official meet-up with guest speakers J.R. Storment, President @ FinOps Foundation and Katelyn Decraene, Cloud Finance Manager @ Morningstar See the full recording here: https://vimeo.com/374237773/a14a5eba6a

1. ©2019 Morningstar. All Rights Reserved.
Katelyn Decraene
Cloud Finance Manager, Cloud Services Team
Cost Management & Cost Star Ratings
to score teams on optimization in AWS

2. 2
OVERVIEW
▪ About Morningstar
▪ Public Cloud Journey
▪ Financial Governance
▪ Cost Star Rating
▪ Questions

3. 3
Our mission is to empower investor success
▪ A leading provider of independent investment research
▪ Extensive line of products and services for individual investors, financial advisors,
asset managers, retirement plan providers and sponsors, and institutional
investors in the private capital markets.
▪ 5,400+ Employees, 27 Countries

4. Public Cloud Journey

5. 5
PUBLIC CLOUD JOURNEY
▪ Journey began in 2017
▪ Small public cloud presence
▪ 1 product team
▪ < 20 individual accounts
▪ Center of Excellence (COE)

6. 6
PUBLIC CLOUD VISION
Own and
operate
the minimum
amount of
infrastructure
Increase our
speed to
market
Support quick
entry into
emerging
markets
Support
maximum
client uptime
and
availability
Efficient and
transparent
cost structure

7. 7
PUBLIC CLOUD JOURNEY - TODAY
ON-PREM
3 data center migrations
3k+ server reduction
PUBLIC CLOUD
120+ team accounts
500 individual accounts
RESOURCES
Dedicated Cloud Services
team

8. Public Cloud Financial Governance

9. 9
COST MANAGEMENT - KEY CHALLENGES
Cost awareness & continuous monitoring
Adopting a cloud mindset
Bad at estimate
Budgeting & forecasting agility
▪ Recognized need for cost management early on

10. 10
FINANCIAL GOVERNANCE PROCESS
Agile Approach – Budgeting
• Budget & re-forecast for existing
initiative
• Reserve pool
Business Case Template
Requirement
• Technical & Financial review –
optimized from the start
• Understanding cost drivers &
associated ramp-up
• Documenting assumptions
(getting better)
Governance Committee
• Meets monthly
• CFO, CIO, CTO, P&L Leads and
Tech Lead
• New initiative funding request
pitched
• Approval requires sign off from
CFO, CIO/CTO, P&L Lead

11. 11
Public Cloud
Governance
Committee
FINOPS LIFECYCLE - CONTINUOUS COST MANAGEMENT
INFORM OPTIMIZE
OPERATE

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INFORM
 We are transparent about spend cross all teams
 Showback of costs by teams & P&L’s
 Weekly spend reports
 Quarterly Business Reviews
 Open communication channels
 Actuals vs. budget QTD, expense trends
 Suggestions for optimization
 Training – 1-hour session - costs came down $12k
Things we can do better & ways we can improve
- Tagging for more granular reporting
- Real-time budget vs. actuals
- Automation (less spreadsheets)
OPTIMIZE
OPERATE
INFORM

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OPTIMIZE
OPTIMIZE
OPERATE
INFORM
 Removing stigma around “cost optimization”
 How we are driving optimization this year
 Team optimization targets – 87.2% to goal
 RI coverage target – 60% (goal met), increased target
 Training & Awareness
 Cost Star Rating
Things we can do better & ways we can improve
- Being more proactive vs. reactive

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OPERATE
▪ Established financial governance committee
▪ More agile budgeting process, continuous re-forecasting
▪ Enhancing collaboration between FA’s & tech teams
Things we can do better & ways we can improve
- Pairing with established architecture office (2020 goal)
- Process automation
OPTIMIZE
OPERATE
INFORM

15. COST STAR RATING

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COST STAR RATING – WHAT IS IT?
▪ A way to surface public cloud cost & usage metrics for teams to benchmark
and measure how optimized they are and identify opportunities to further
optimize
▪ 5-star rating scale
▪ Incorporated into weekly product score cards

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PRODUCT SCORE CARD – WHAT IS IT?
▪ Internal use only
▪ Measures product security, disaster
recover & operational readiness
▪ Brinqa – Cybersecurity Risk Management
▪ Sent to teams on a weekly basis

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METHODOLOGY
▪ Determined by a working group with stakeholders from technology, finance
& operations (centrally & product teams)
▪ Formulated through research & resources of AWS best practices

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TRUSTED ADVISOR
▪ AWS native tool that
helps provide
recommendations &
best practices to
improve performance,
reliability, security &
cost.

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METHODOLOGY
1. Grouped AWS services
into opportunity tiers
• Identified top services by spend to
target first
2. Established metrics to
identify optimization
opportunities & assign
severity
• Example: If average CPU % less
than X% per week AND Maximum
CPU % less than X% per week,
create a ticket & assign severity
(Critical, High, Medium or Low
3. Overall rating
determined based on
number of issues identified
and severity of issues
• Example: 1-Star - if team has at
least X # Critical Severity Issues OR
more than X # High severity tickets

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THE TOOLKIT
▪ Scanning Engine & Cloud Services API
▪ AWS Trusted Advisor – data source
▪ JIRA - Issue tracking tool
▪ Brinqa - Rating calculation tool
▪ Leverage existing product scorecards to
surface data

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HOW IT WORKS
- Scan for
optimization checks
- Creates
issues/tickets for
each finding
- Assigns severity
- Calculates overall
rating based on
number and severity
of tickets

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JIRA ISSUE (example)
ISSUE TYPE
RESOURCE ID
SEVERITY

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ISSUE REMEDIATION
▪ Cost Star Rating information page linked to rating with resources for teams
to understand methodology and provide cost optimization resources & tips
▪ Exception handling process for special circumstances (POC, disaster
recover)
▪ Appropriate action taken (rightsize, decommission, etc.) - not detected in
the weekly scan, ticket/finding closed

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PHASE 1 - FINDINGS
▪ AWS Service – EC2, RDS, EBS
▪ 3,233 cost optimization findings identified to-date
▪ EC2 represents majority of findings (92%)
▪ 2,416 findings have been remediated
EC2,
91.5%
RDS,
7.1%
EBS,
1.3%
0
200
400
600
800
1000
1200
1400
1600
1800
2000
JUL AUG SEP OCT NOV
Optimization Ticket Trend
Tickets Open Tickets Created Tickets Close
Impacting
Scorecards

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PHASE 1 – RESULTS
▪ 2019 goal all teams 3-Star & above – 51% to target
▪ Percentage of teams at target up 27% to date
▪ Takeaway - teams are aware & taking action
24.0%
31.0%
51.0%
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
JUL SEP NOV
Cost Star Rating - 3 Star+ Teams

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PHASE 1 – RESULTS
▪ Q2 vs Q3 Trusted Advisor Checks*
▪ Amazon EC2
− 16% decrease in number of underutilized instances
– Slight decrease in monthly costs – monthly spend per instance hour down 13.1%
– Inventory of ec2 instances remained relatively flat
– Focus more training around EC2 optimization
▪ Amazon RDS
− 28% decrease in number of underutilized instances
– Monthly costs down 19.3%
– RDS instance inventory down 11.6% (more termination vs. right-sizing)
▪ Amazon EBS
− 5% decrease in number of underutilized volumes
– No material impact noted, re-asses threshold of in scope EBS volumes
*Note that optimization metrics used for Cost Star are more conservative than those use by trusted advisor

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ENHANCEMENTS IN-PROGRESS
▪ Incorporate materiality of potential savings into methodology
▪ Be able to easily quantify savings from remediation

29. Questions, Comments,
Recommendations/Feedback?

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FINOPS MEET-UP – What’s Next?
▪ FinOps Foundation - https://www.finops.org/
▪ Chicago chapter meet-up group page: https://www.meetup.com/Chicago-
FinOps
▪ Look for next meeting – Q1 2020
▪ Interested in hosting or co-organizing, please reach out!

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CONTACT INFO
▪ Katelyn Decraene (katelyndecraene@gmail.com)
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/katelyndecraene/