The AmeerCloud FinOps Framework
Cloud cost optimization shouldn’t start when Finance receives the invoice. It must be considered throughout every phase of the infrastructure engineering lifecycle.
Code
Consider cost before infrastructure is created. Architects and developers make cost commitments every time they write Terraform or CloudFormation.
- Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform/OpenTofu) cost estimation in pull requests
- Selecting appropriately sized base instances and storage volume types
- Architecting multi-AZ traffic patterns to avoid expensive cross-zone transfers
Deploy
Introduce cost awareness and guardrails when infrastructure is deployed. Prevent configuration drift and unmonitored test workloads from reaching production.
- CI/CD automated cost policies and budget thresholds
- Mandatory tag enforcement for team, project, and environment
- Automated teardown policies for non-production environments
Run
Optimize infrastructure that is already running. Continuously tune utilization, detect idle resources, and eliminate compute overprovisioning.
- Kubernetes pod request/limit rightsizing based on 95th percentile metrics
- Automated discovery of detached EBS volumes and idle load balancers
- Storage lifecycle policies (S3 Intelligent-Tiering and Glacier)
Allocate
Understand who, what product, or which workload is responsible for spend. Eliminate unallocated cloud costs and provide engineering teams with clear unit economics.
- Multi-account AWS Organization structure and cost center attribution
- Container-level cost allocation in shared EKS clusters
- Cost anomaly detection and alerting for engineering owners
Billing
Optimize rates, commitments, and the economics of the cloud bill. Execute financial rate reductions only after infrastructure has been rightsized.
- Compute Savings Plans vs EC2 Instance Savings Plans modeling
- Reserved Instances coverage for steady-state RDS and ElastiCache
- Commitment expiration tracking and phased renewal strategies