We understand that every company has different needs, processes, experience, and people. First we will have a discovery meeting where we’ll gather information about how your company uses AWS, which includes a comparison of cloud services to on-prem resources (hybrid scenarios) in order to capture a complete picture of your company's cloud usage and needs. Next, we will develop a two-phase process to maximize cost savings while working with you.
Phase 1: Investigation
During this two-week phase we will comb through your environment to find cost-optimization opportunities. From this phase, we will provide several deliverables. A subset of the items we will analyze includes:
Architectural updates and app rewrites
Automated scheduling
Compression and data formats used
Data transfer
Long running apps that can benefit from committed use discounts
Over-provisioned, unoptimized, and unnecessary resources
Action Plan
The action plan is a detailed proposal to tackle cost-savings opportunities that will minimize risk and maximize value in the shortest amount of time. The plan will include information such as:
Estimated savings, risk, and time
Recommended what, why, and how
Recommended rollback plan
Target service and categorized opportunity
Target resource counts and configuration
Executive Summary
The executive summary is a carefully crafted report that highlights key information without all of the bloat that comes with a full-fledged report. Including visualizations like graphs and images that will depict situational cost savings based on the recommended actions defined within your personalized action plan.
Resource Spreadsheet
This exhaustively detailed spreadsheet lists target resources and identifies cost-savings opportunities. Fields included in the spreadsheet range from resource properties like instance type to recommended actions, as well as estimated cost savings.
Phase 2: Execution
During this ten-week phase we will work alongside your team to execute on the aforementioned action plan to deliver real results. We understand that every team has a different operating model.
Control
You remain in charge! You will decide whether you would prefer us to assist you or make the changes on your own. We can stage the recommended changes and wait for your signoff before deploying them. We can walk your team through what the changes are and why we would like to apply them to your environment.
Guarantee
Our promise to you. We guarantee that we will be able to save you something! If we cannot reduce your cost, then you will not owe us anything for the time spent. There is no value bringing in outside help if your situation cannot be improved.
Low Risk
Change is scary. We will take every precaution to ensure all risks are minimized. Our experts will prepare all the changes for review before applying them to your environment. The actual changes will only happen with your team’s approval and during your existing maintenance windows. Rollback plans will be created just in case anything unexpected happens. Our team will make themselves available on call to assist with any change-related issues.
Tools
We will bend to the tools that are important to you. If your change management requires Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), or popular tools like CDK, CloudFormation, Pulumi, and Terraform, then we can deliver recommended changes using those same tools.
After we complete the two phases during the 12-week process, we will reflect on where we are and what we have done. We will determine if an iterative approach is required to move forward.. If that is the case, we will gladly restart the entire process over again to find new cost saving opportunities and reduce your cloud spend.
Written by Justin Wheeler, Senior Software Engineer