Case Study - Creating Cloud Value for a US Federal Agency
Challenge
After transitioning their system from on-premises to AWS GovCloud, a US federal agency experienced an unexpected increase in cloud costs, rather than the anticipated efficiencies. The expense of operating numerous development, test, and production environments in the cloud surpassed projections. This unforeseen surge threatened to cause budget overruns in subsequent years, revealing that the initial design was failing to fully leverage the business value of the cloud for the agency.
Solution
Our solution was informed by ManTech’s national security domain expertise and our understanding of FinOps. As a blend of Finance and DevOps, FinOps is an operational framework and cultural practice dedicated to maximizing the business value of cloud to ensure financial accountability through best practices, a robust practitioner community, and technology specifications. The FinOps framework provides mission critical support with all aspects of cloud deployment, including core personas/stakeholders across engineering, finance, leadership, products and procurement. Architecting for the cloud requires continuous collaboration by these core personas/stakeholders across an organization to address their individual perspectives, challenges, and expected outcomes in order to effectively and successfully implement the cloud. Architecting for the cloud requires actions by stakeholders across an organization.
We collaborated with agency engineers, developers, and product owners to create a solution that emulated a large, complex, production environment, while avoiding unnecessary costs. This involved setting up a comprehensive development environment, a smaller version of the production system with test data. Each Agile Team could initiate the test system in Amazon Web Services (AWS) GovCloud at the start of the workday and shut it down at the end of the day, keeping cloud costs low.
Our team began by analyzing the existing production system and underlying mission requirements to determine the minimum viable components that needed to be included in a smaller, test-friendly version of the system. We applied best practices of the FinOps Framework, focusing on optimizing cloud usage and cost by automated environment provisioning, scaling, and tiering cost-effective storage solutions. ManTech proposed a solution that integrated Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools, enabling the automatic setup and teardown of development environments on demand. We worked with the customer to establish the criteria for what the “smaller version of the production system” would include, ensuring that it provided sufficient functionality for testing while minimizing resource usage.
Our FinOps engineers developed a set of IaC templates that allowed Agile teams to spin up a fully functional development environment with a single command or button press. This environment included all necessary components, such as virtual machines, databases, and networking configurations, but was scaled down to reduce costs. We introduced an automated shutdown feature that could be triggered manually by the team at the end of the workday or automatically based on predefined schedules. This ensured that cloud resources were used only during active development periods.
After implementing the automated spin-up / down capability, we applied additional optimizations. We moved instances that required minimal CPU resources from CPU-optimized instances to memory-optimized instances and moved to instances with less expensive processors. These best practices were executed across more than a dozen development environments yielding substantial reduction in cost.
Impact
We thrive when our customer’s mission is successful. Through implementation of FinOps, our solution for this Federal Agency revolutionized their approach to managing cloud costs. Our solution:
• Yielded total combined cost avoidance of over $1M per year
• Enhanced operational efficiencies.
• Provided data-driven decision making.
• Fostered a collaborative approach to financial accountability and transparency across the organization
