© 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.

Elvy Lee, Sr. Finance Leader, Intuit

Dieter Matzion, Sr. Business Analyst, Intuit

Keith Jarrett, Business Development Manager, Cloud Economics

December 1, 2016

How to Start Your Own Cost

Optimization ProgramLearnings From Intuit’s Cloud Journey

ENT315

Raise your hand

What We Learned.

• Savings potential is large!

• Framework for implementing best

practices at scale

• Architecture best practices

• Ongoing operational best practices

• At the center of cost optimization is a

team

Bridging the Gap Between

Framework & Implementation

What to Expect.

• Recapping Cost Optimization Pillars

• Implementing Best Practices

• Establishing Metrics

• Creating a Cloud Culture

• Migrating to the cloud

Let’s Recap:

Cost Optimization at Scale

Limit

Provisioning

Target

Setting

Automation

Periodic

Review

Charge-

backs

Pricing

Model

Autoscaling

Turn off

unused

Cost

Optimized

Direct

Inputs

Indirect

Inputs

Key Cost

Optimization

Drivers at

Scale

Where do you start?

The Five Pillars of Cost Optimization

Right-Sizing Your

Instances

Pick the Right

Pricing Model

Increase

Elasticity

Measuring &

Monitoring

Match Usage to

Storage Class

Let’s meet the team

© 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.

Elvy Lee, Sr. Finance Leader, Intuit

Dieter Matzion, Sr. Business Analyst, Intuit

December 1, 2016

How to Start Your Own Cost

Optimization ProgramLearnings From Intuit’s Cloud Journey

ENT315

What to Expect from the Session

Intuit overview and journey to AWS

Share how we got started on cost optimization … initial focus on reserved instances (RIs)

External best practices

Active management of RIs

Automation, reporting, and mechanisms to ensure low waste, high leverage

Go through the next set of tools and capabilities we’re building

Ops and tools relevant to us

Driving a cost-conscious culture through partnering and chargebacks

Questions, suggestions, and ideas along the way and at the end

Our goal: We learn something from each other

1

2

3

4

Who We Are

Founded

8,000

Employees

37M

Customers

1993

IPO

5B

Revenue

22

Locations

1983

Recognized as One of the World’s Leading Companies

Why AWS & the public cloud?

• Enable speed & ease for our developers

• Accelerate towards being true cloud & SaaS

• Scalable, elastic, global and reliable

Why an optimization program?

• Lots of opportunity to tune costs

• Best-in-class, large scale SaaS companies

have focused teams on this

• We are still discovering all the levers we have

Made significant progress; much more to accomplish

Public Cloud

Intuit Hosting

• Multiple data centers • Consolidated & fewer data

centers

A FEW YEARS AGO … TODAY

• Monolithic code bases

• Manual deployment and

configuration

• Cloud-based services

• Continuous Integration /

Continuous Deployment

Uncovering New Opportunities for Hosting

AWS SPEND RAMPING UP

FY’17FY’16FY’15FY’14 FY’18

STRATEGY

1. Reserved instances (RI) – Prepay for

capacity to realize up to 60% savings

vs. on-demand (OD) prices

2. Elasticity – Turn off non-production

instances during off-hours; don’t

establish a compute footprint that’s

larger than customer demand dictates

(pay only what you use)

3. Right-sizing – Use most appropriate

instance family/type for the workload

Thoughtful but Scrappy Start to Our Cost Optimization

External learnings Learnings & pivotsOngoing metrics &

mechanisms

Quick experiment: Small RI

purchases to get operational

understanding

Learnings & pivots:

• Transparency, reporting, and tools

were an important initial investment

• Insufficient capacity errors & reporting

• Lots of non-standard instances …

need on-going hygiene & clean-up

plan

• Needed to leverage automation

• Evangelize the teams … 2-3 six-

pagers to align on strategy, benefits,

risks and best practices

Completed best-practices AWS check

with SaaS technology peers

• Ongoing mechanisms with CFO,

CTO, our “cloud stewards” to

ensure progress

• Monthly purchases & modification

• Success measures:

• RI coverage 90%+ “standard”

instances

• Waste <10%

• Cumulative savings measures

INITIAL OPPORTUNITIES

Leverage reserved instances (RI)

Transparency & tools … create the

data and reports so we buy the right

stuff

Establish mechanisms & purchase

cadence (every month)

Establish scrappy central team …

to drive execution across

2

3

4

1

External learnings Learnings & pivots

Impact of implementing reserved instances

• Central RI strategy

• Usage clean-up plans

• Monitor & analytic tools

• Fragmented setup

• Diverse instances

• No best practice sharing

FROM TO

Total usage

Usage up, cost per hour down since last year

70% usage

40% cost per usage hour

Good Progress, More Work to Do

Today

No active management of RIs

No automation, no reporting,

14-day purchase cycles

No deployment standards, no policies,

no best practices

Lagging industry on cost optimization

Last Year

Ongoing program, saving dollars to be re-invested

in engineering and product

RI coverage from ~20% to ~80% (goal = 90%)

Joint team with Finance & Product Infrastructure

Several dashboards; improved data ingestion of

AWS feeds (e.g., DBR, ICE, VPC mapping)

4-7 day purchase cycles (goal = 1 day)

Designed and implemented a “clean-up” plan

Catching up fast!

Limited AWS ops involvement Several white papers informing roadmap & strategy

So what’s next?

Continue Enhancing Our AWS Ops

• Initial focus is visibility into AWS, starting with DBR, ICE and utilization, and

moving to code tracing and systems performance (e.g., performance counters)

• More complex systems like purchase recommendations, right-sizing, A/B cloud

impact, and squeeze testing, will be fed from the systems that provide visibility

• Establish deeper partnership with service owners to guide consistency

Squeeze Testing

Detailed Billing

Report (DBR)PerformanceUtilization Code Tracing

RI Purchase

Recommendation

RI Modification Right-sizing A/B Cloud Impact

Co

st

Op

tim

iza

tio

n

Operational & Technical Capability

We’ll Be Focusing in These Core Areas in the

Coming Months

• Shorter RI modification times …

automate modifications and purchases

• Complete ”clean-up” plans

• Track purchases, build RI database

• Self-service reporting for all AWS data

feeds

• Continue to actively track: (1) Amazon

EC2 launch events, (2) insufficient

capacity errors (ICE), (3) behavioral

changes of users

• Build near real-time ICE feed using

AWS CloudTrail

• Utilization (CPU, RAM, disk, network):

build a right-sizing framework

• Track Amazon S3, Amazon RDS,

Amazon EBS, Snapshots: automated

cleanup, lifecycle management

• Turn off dev/test environments outside

of business hours

• Scale back bigger offerings during

non-peak

Building a Cost-Conscious & Active

Management Culture

PARTNERING CHARGEBACKS TO DRIVE ACCOUNTABILITY

• Help teams with migration planning

• Work with cloud stewards to

understand “click-down” plans

• Share best practices, standards,

and any clean-up initiatives

We pass through savings & costs to business unit

• We charge the business P&Ls for every unit of

hosting (internal and external)

• Chargeback for AWS costs

• Pass back RI savings to teams using a blended

rate approach

Chargebacks must:

• Drive accountability and incent the right behaviors

• Be transparent and easy to understand and

implement

• Meet SEC reporting requirements

In Closing …

• Start small, but just get going!

• Invest in reporting transparency and visibility

• Metrics, mechanisms, and chargebacks to drive good

behaviors … passing back both costs and savings

• Reinforce an active management mindset

Thank you!

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