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How to use AWS console tag editor in 3 simple steps.
by Eric Thibeault (Ted)

Here is a very easy way to get your tagging under control. Simply use the  AWS Console Tag Editor that is already available with your AWS console.

  1. Login to your console and click on “Resource Groups” then “Tag Editor“
  2. Find the resource to tag. Enter the regions that you would like to lookup resources in. For the resource types, I would recommend to start with the most important EC2 Instances.  You can also search with existing tags.  Useful options include “contains, not tagged and empty value” where you input the tag values.
  3. Select the resource you like to update. Be carful not to blindly select everything. Notice the download icon on the top right of the table, it allows you to download a csv of all of your resources with their current tags. This is actually the only place in the console where you can see and download a list of all of the resources that you have from all regions…
  4. Click on “Edit Tags for selected” and add/update the tags for all of the selected resources. Note, the screen shows your existing tags. If there are multiple resources with different values for the same tag, you will see “Multiple values.”  Again, be careful.  If you change it to a new value, it will remove old values for all of the selected resources.  A workaround, is to tell the initial search not to include the already tagged resources. (Ex: Tags: Team,  Value: Not tagged.) This will filter out the resources that are already tagged.
  5. Finally, click on “Apply changes.”  There is no way to “undo” so make sure that you take your time. You may also want to click on the download icon and select option “Export all columns” before updating all of your resources. You will then be able to see all tags for each resource of that search.

Once you have all of your infrastructure following your tagging policy, make sure to implement some automation to enforce your policy.

 

That’s it!  Click, search, update and you are done.

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WTF is going on with our AWS expense!!!
by Eric Thibeault (Ted)

Your CFO calls and politely asks, “WTF is going on with our AWS expenses? It keeps going up and we did not budget for this increase!”

Here are a few tips you should consider before making any drastic decisions. Like moving everything back into your datacenter or taking access away from your teams with hopes of stopping the bleeding:

Cloud Economy Training

Get basic training around cloud economy for your staff. This should be top-down, including groups outside of engineering, like your accounting and product groups. Public cloud is gaining a lot of traction – more and more people have a much better understanding of this field. However, the cloud economy is still a big mystery for most people.

I have seen leaders ask their teams to build infrastructure in the cloud that can support high Transaction Per Seconds (TPS) in order to be able to meet twice their projected load. They end up with an infrastructure that costs a fortune, running very little load for 12 months before really starting to pickup load…  If these leaders had known more about the cloud, they could have simply asked to build an infrastructure that can autoscale up to X TPS. It would force the teams to educate themselves on how to do this. Currently, the teams simply built their infrastructure in the same way they did when building on prem.

The company still saved some money by building their infrastructure in the cloud. However, had the teams spent some time on training before moving towards the cloud, they could have saved A LOT more.

Cloud Financial Governance

Establish basic cloud financial governance. The current process you have to approve the purchase of hardware is probably not a good fit. You need to establish different processes to allocate and track budgets. Allow budget to grow with usage and expect it to reduce when usage goes down.

Consider hiring a cloud financial analyst/operation (FinOps) to help keep track of your expenses, find optimization opportunities, and to help provide a predictable outlook on your “cloud finances” to your accounting group. A predictable outlook should keep the CFO off your back. Look into subscribing to a Cloud Management Platform (CMP), like CloudCheckr.com or CloudHealthtech.com, and make sure the right people in your organization have access to them – the more, the better.

Cost and utilization visibility

Provide visibility of expense and % of your cloud infrastructure utilization. This should be available to managers and engineers alike on a weekly or daily basis. If your teams are empowered to create infrastructure, they need to see and understand the financial impact of their decisions.

You will be amazed to see the financial benefits of training your teams to be more cost-efficient. Cost and utilization % (ie: CPU/RAM/Network/IO) are the 2 key points you should make sure all of your teams see. Netflix made this into a game, pushing their teams to build cost efficient systems and having fun doing it.

Consider hiring Cloud Solution Architect to help guide your teams to build highly available, scalable, and secure infrastructure at the lowest cost.

Conclusion

According to the “RightScale 2017 State of the Cloud Report (https://www.rightscale.com/lp/state-of-the-cloud)”, cost optimization is the top challenge for everyone. Get educated, put in place some basic governance, and empower your teams by providing them visibility into the right information. Most importantly, have fun doing it.

Thanks