FinOps and Cloud Cost Optimisation
at Optima

Optima Technology is an Australian based SaaS company that offers accurate, automated and secure energy data management solutions. From a handful of clients in 2016, Optima has grown to manage more than 530,000 customers and over $8.7 billion in spend across six countries.

Optima’s purpose is to power a faster transition to net zero for every business by setting a new benchmark for net zero data accuracy. Their platform allows customers to make decisions informed by data and formulate policy based on robust foundations.

Optima is currently focused on Net Zero reporting as well as Bill Management and Procurement Planning.

The Challenge

With scale came the increasing use of AWS cloud technologies to power Optima’s SaaS offering. This rapid adoption of a range of services from the AWS ecosystem made it increasingly important to accurately measure the value and cost of these cloud solutions. It is the quintessential scale up challenge, how to leverage the cloud to scale while simultaneously managing and optimising cloud usage and spend.

Midnyte City was working with Optima on a DevOps initiative when the question of cost trajectory was raised. A small co-sourced team from both organisations banded together to maintain a competitive advantage by optimising the operational AWS costs. The co-sourced model allowed Optima to continue to focus on powering a faster transition to net zero for every business, but also enabled the internal team to improve cost optimisation across the platform and improve cloud cost literacy across development teams.

The brief was simple:

• Assessment the current platform and infrastructure costs

• Identify any opportunity to reduce waste

• Technology leadership to enable teams to see, measure and manage the cost of their solutions

The Solution

Optima needed a consulting partner who could hit the ground running, assisting the team to identify and more effectively measure the operational costs of workloads. As well as begin uplifting the internal Optima teams to continue measuring these costs for the current and future states of their applications.

The Midnyte City crew worked with Optima Technology to uplift and educate the teams to better understand the cloud cost model.

Further, the Midnyte City team assisted with a review of existing architecture and infrastructure with a focus on:

• Measuring (and continuing to measure) the cost/value benefit of each workload

• The non-functional requirements of workloads and how they might affect the operational cost/performance

Almost immediately, the team were able to identify changes to the cloud infrastructure that would begin to net over 20% savings of the current monthly spend. A lot of these changes involved removal of waste (under or non-utilised infrastructure) within the platform.

In order to identify these changes, the team began by utilising AWS Cost Explorer to navigate the operational costs within the environment. This was also used to demonstrate and better educate the teams to understand the cloud cost model.

Further to this, the team also leveraged New Relic with the appropriate AWS Billing integration (via AWS CloudWatch Metrics) to further customise the visibility of the team’s infrastructure costs. This allows for a simpler view of the consolidated billing across the different Optima AWS accounts - at a high level:

Figure 1. A simplified view of the tooling used to contextualise Optima technology’s cloud spend

This tooling aligned to the current technology stack, as New Relic was a large part of Optima’s existing observability posture. This also meant that the team who were already familiar with the New Relic experience would be able to leverage existing skills. This resulted in real-time dashboarding, measuring operational cost alongside other operational metrics. For example; the team were able to visualise the I/O use of an AWS DocumentDB store and how that directly correlated to any increases in cumulative cost of the DocumentDB service in real-time:

Figure 2. An example of of how the team were able to visualise Cumulative DocumentDB cost against Document DB Operations

This tooling had the added benefit of allowing the team to further understand how the AWS cost model worked within the context of their solutions, as well as identify any immediate, high-level changes that could be made to reduce operational costs - which Midnyte City and Optima were able to remediate very quickly.

The Results

The Ability to Understand and Measure Cost

After observing how the team were poised to own and measure the cost of their solutions, Midnyte City was able to help implement the right tooling to ensure the cloud cost model is understood and measurable.

By enabling further use of tooling that the Optima technology team were already familiar with, the team were able to quickly identify and continue to identify and optimise for cost across their workloads.

Reduction in Operational Cloud Cost

Like many cloud-first, rapidly scaling organisations, Optima’s monthly AWS bill was a growing expense. With the new ability to measure and better understand these costs, Midnyte City and Optima were able to implement a range of cloud cost management practices, such as right sizing instances and removal of waste via the deletion of old snapshots and the removal of redundant compute instances.

As a result, Optima’s monthly AWS bill was reduced by over 20%, representing tens of thousands in cost savings.