Implement FinOps best practices by Optimizing Underutilized Resource Cost with Oracle Integration Recipe
This post is the work of Gaurav Mahna. Thanks to him for sharing this with the wider Oracle integration community.
In today’s cloud-infrastructure driven landscape, managing operational costs along with FinOps team is paramount. Unmanaged and ungoverned IaaS & PaaS services can lead to significant cost over runs. One area often overlooked is the expenditure associated with non-production (non-prod) instances / services that remain idle or underutilized. Lots of companies have dedicated FinOps teams and working on frameworks to untap this cost saving. This blog delves into the business implications of underutilized non-prod instances, strategies for cost optimization, and how Oracle Integration’s prebuilt recipe offers an effective solution to adhere to one of Finops best practices.
📊 The Business Challenge: Idle Non-Prod Instances Costs
Non-prod environments—such as development, testing, and staging—are essential for application lifecycle management. However, these environments often run continuously, even during off-peak hours, leading to unnecessary costs.
Key Cost Factors:
- Continuous Resource Consumption: Idle instances still consume compute resources (OCPU and memory), leading to ongoing cost.
- Underutilization: Instances with low CPU, memory, and network usage contribute to inefficiencies.
- Lack of Automation: Manual management of instance uptime increases the risk of human error and inconsistent practice.
As per latest report from Mckinsey : Everything is better as code: Using FinOps to manage cloud costs ; Companies are clearly struggling to implement Finops best practices & working towards a solutions as “FinOps as Code” – FaC to bring in practical approach to integrating financial management principles into the infrastructure management life cycle (IMLC) to automatically manage cloud costs. In the same article, Mckinsey estimated the potential value from FaC to be about $120 billion.
💰 Cost Optimization Strategy: Automate Start/Stop of Non-Prod Instances
Every organization’s cloud usage and optimization needs vary based on compute, storage, and security requirements. However, adopting common best practices like regular monitoring, metric tracking, and monthly reporting can greatly enhance cloud and IT financial management.
One of the best practice to perform cost optimization is to leverage scheduling options to start & stop the IaaS computes & PaaS services. We can perform below actions to implement it:
- Scheduled Downtime: Identify usage patterns & Stop non-prod instances during off-hours (nights, weekends) when they are not in use. Start back the instances during working hours.
- Automation: Leverage CLI commands and APIs provided by OCI to utilize automation tools or Oracle Integration Cloud for managing instance start and stop schedules, thereby reducing manual intervention.
- Monitoring and Alerts: Implement monitoring to identify underutilized resources and trigger alerts or actions accordingly.
By adopting these practices, businesses can significantly reduce their cloud expenditure without compromising on development and testing capabilities.
As per report from US Federal Agency: Federal Technology Investment Management (FTIM) Community of Practice (CoP) & Cloud & Infrastructure (C&I) CoP – FinOps Operational Best Practices cloud architects can automate the start and stop of services per their usage pattern to save more than 60 percent (108 [night & weekend hours]/168 [hours per week]) of the costs on their non-production environments.
🛠️ The Solution: Oracle Integration’s Prebuilt Recipe for Starting & Stopping OCI Compute Instances
Oracle Integration offers a prebuilt recipe titled “Oracle Integration — OCI | Start and Stop Compute Instances”, designed to automate the management of OCI compute instances.
Features of the Recipe:
- Scheduled Automation Configure schedules to automatically start or stop instances based on predefined ties.
- REST Adapter Integration Leverages OCI’s REST APIs with Signature Version 1 security for secure operations.
- Error Handling Includes mechanisms to send email notifications in case of failures or issues during execution. It is helpful to raise alerts for Ops team managing infrastructure.
- Lookup Configuration Utilizes lookup tables to manage instance details and notification settings.
Implementation Steps:
- Install the Recipe Access the Oracle Integration Store from your OIC console and install the desired recipe.
- Configure Connections Set up REST connections with appropriate OCI credentials and endpoints.
- Define Lookups Input instance OCIDs, region information, and notification details into the lookup tables.
- Activate and Schedule Deploy the integration and configure the schedule as per business requirements.
For a detailed walkthrough, refer to the official Oracle documentation: Oracle Integration — OCI | Start and Stop Compute Instances.
✅ Business Benefits
Implementing this automated solution offers several advantages:
- Cost Savings Reduces unnecessary compute charges by ensuring instances run only when needed.
- Operational Efficiency Minimizes manual tasks, allowing IT teams to focus on more strategic initiatives.
- Reliability Built-in error handling and notifications ensure prompt response to any issues.
- Scalability Easily extendable to manage multiple instances across different environments. Also, similar Scheduler Integrations can be leveraged to start & stop services, like Instance Pools, Analytics cloud, Java cloud service, Database Classic cloud, Exadata cloud etc
📌 Conclusion
Managing cloud costs is a continuous endeavour, and optimizing non-prod compute usage is a significant step toward financial efficiency. Oracle Integration’s prebuilt recipe provides a robust, automated solution to manage OCI compute instances effectively. By integrating this into your IT operations, you can achieve substantial cost savings and streamline your infrastructure management.
For further guidance or assistance in implementing this solution, feel free to reach out or consult the detailed Oracle documentation provided above.