ABACUS: A FinOps Service for Cloud Cost Optimization

TL;DR

ABACUS is a FinOps tool that enhances cloud cost management by setting budgets, enforcing them, and providing cost visibility through alerts and best practices like Infrastructure-as-Code.

Contribution

The paper introduces ABACUS, a comprehensive FinOps service that integrates budget enforcement, alerts, and proactive cost estimation to improve cloud cost optimization.

Findings

Effective budget enforcement reduces unnecessary cloud spending.

Proactive alerts help teams manage costs before deployment.

Integration of best practices improves cost visibility.

Abstract

In recent years, as more enterprises have moved their infrastructure to the cloud, significant challenges have emerged in achieving holistic cloud spend visibility and cost optimization. FinOps practices provide a way for enterprises to achieve these business goals by optimizing cloud costs and bringing accountability to cloud spend. This paper presents ABACUS - Automated Budget Analysis and Cloud Usage Surveillance, a FinOps solution for optimizing cloud costs by setting budgets, enforcing those budgets through blocking new deployments, and alerting appropriate teams if spending breaches a budget threshold. ABACUS also leverages best practices like Infrastructure-as-Code to alert engineering teams of the expected cost of deployment before resources are deployed in the cloud. Finally, future research directions are proposed to advance the state of the art in this important field.