COST01-BP08 Create a cost-aware culture
Implement changes or programs across your organization to create a cost-aware culture. It is recommended to start small, then as your capabilities increase and your organization’s use of the cloud increases, implement large and wide ranging programs.
Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: Low
Implementation guidance
A cost-aware culture allows you to scale cost optimization and Cloud Financial Management (financial operations, cloud center of excellence, cloud operations teams, and so on) through best practices that are performed in an organic and decentralized manner across your organization. Cost awareness allows you to create high levels of capability across your organization with minimal effort, compared to a strict top-down, centralized approach.
Creating cost awareness in cloud computing, especially for primary cost drivers in cloud computing, allows teams to understand expected outcomes of any changes in cost perspective. Teams who access the cloud environments should be aware of pricing models and the difference between traditional on-premesis datacenters and cloud computing.
The main benefit of a cost-aware culture is that technology teams optimize costs proactively and continually (for example, they are considered a non-functional requirement when architecting new workloads, or making changes to existing workloads) rather than performing reactive cost optimizations as needed.
Small changes in culture can have large impacts on the efficiency of your current and future workloads. Examples of this include:
Giving visibility and creating awareness in engineering teams to understand what they do, and what they impact in terms of cost.
Gamifying cost and usage across your organization. This can be done through a publicly visible dashboard, or a report that compares normalized costs and usage across teams (for example, cost-per-workload and cost-per-transaction).
Recognizing cost efficiency. Reward voluntary or unsolicited cost optimization accomplishments publicly or privately, and learn from mistakes to avoid repeating them in the future.
Creating top-down organizational requirements for workloads to run at pre-defined budgets.
Questioning business requirements of changes, and the cost impact of requested changes to the architecture infrastructure or workload configuration to make sure you pay only what you need.
Making sure the change planner is aware of expected changes that have a cost impact, and that they are confirmed by the stakeholders to deliver business outcomes cost-effectively.
Implementation steps
Report cloud costs to technology teams: To raise cost awareness, and establish efficiency KPIs for finance and business stakeholders.
Inform stakeholders or team members about planned changes: Create an agenda item to discuss planned changes and the cost-benefit impact on the workload during weekly change meetings.
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Meet with your account team: Establish a regular meeting cadence with your account team, and discuss industry trends and AWS services. Speak with your account manager, architect, and support team.
Share success stories: Share success stories about cost reduction for any workload, AWS account, or organization to create a positive attitude and encouragement around cost optimization.
Training: Ensure technical teams or team members are trained for awareness of resource costs on AWS Cloud.
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AWS events and meetups: Attend local AWS summits, and any local meetups with other organizations from your local area.
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Subscribe to blogs: Go to the AWS blogs pages and subscribe to the What's New Blog
and other relevant blogs to follow new releases, implementations, examples, and changes shared by AWS.
Resources
Related documents:
Related examples:
