Make FinOps a Seamless Part of Your DevOps Workflows

Not necessarily. While most FinOps tools focus on the pricing offered by the cloud service providers, Torque manages the provisioning of infrastructure in a way that improves efficiency by identifying, denying, and eliminating waste.

Torque streamlines the creation, provisioning, and ongoing management of cloud environments. For FinOps teams, Torque can be used to integrate cost-efficiency standards into day-to-day DevOps, IT operations, and other engineering workflows.

For example, a FinOps team may identify right-sizing opportunities that could significantly eliminate wasted cloud costs. With Torque, the FinOps team can establish a policy prohibiting the deployment of the overly expensive instance sizes. Once activated, Torque will automatically deny any attempt to provision a cloud instance that violates that policy on size.

Torque can also help FinOps teams identify additional opportunities for cost savings. Torque’s AI Copilot reviews all cloud services deployed via the platform and identifies those which are inactive, providing a report showing all idle resources that administrators can review and act on. Beyond the immediate cost savings of terminating those instances, these insights can be valuable for identifying recurring trends that inflate cloud costs.

So while Torque is not a traditional FinOps tool, the role it plays in the delivery of cloud infrastructure makes it valuable for achieving the end goal of a FinOps team–cloud cost optimization.

Torque creates an Environment as Code blueprint for each cloud resource managed through the platform, requires a pre-set duration prior to the deployment of those environments, and monitors the state of those live resources continuously. This blueprint defines the infrastructure code, application services, input parameters, dependencies, and any other resources needed to deliver the output of the environment.

For temporary, non-production workloads, administrators can require users to set a duration after which Torque will automatically terminate all cloud services deployed. In cases where the same workloads are provisioned at the beginning of each work day, Torque will automatically provision these resources and terminate them based on the schedule set by the administrator. For ad-hoc environment deployments, Torque users will see a required form field and simple pick-list to set the duration of the environment they’re about to deploy–with the maximum duration set by the administrator. This allows users to run a workload for just the amount of time they need it.

Based on the cloud service defined in the Environment as Code blueprint and the duration set upon deployment, Torque can calculate the actual cost of those cloud resources before they’re deployed. This allows Torque to display projected costs for any resource available on the self-service catalog where users deploy these resources, establishing accountability.

This data is also valuable for Torque’s governance capabilities. Torque administrators can set policies to deny the provisioning of any environment configured to exceed a custom cost threshold, including the ability to trigger approvals workflows. This allows administrators to prevent costly activity without requiring a FinOps or DevOps engineer to review every resource prior to deploying them.

In a couple of ways. Torque can automatically apply tags to every cloud resource deployed via the platform, including for ad-hoc deployments. When users provision an ad-hoc environment via Torque’s self-service catalog, they can browse a field with a pre-set pick-list of tags that Torque will automatically apply to the cloud service upon deployment. Administrators can also set default values so that users can skip tagging altogether. This ensures that no resource is deployed with missing or misspelled tags, which can throw off cost reporting.

Torque also executes Day 2 actions on live cloud infrastructure, which can include applying tags to cloud resources. This can enable FinOps and DevOps teams to integrate automated tagging on cloud infrastructure as part of the standard lifecycle of a cloud environment.

Since Torque executes the code to provision cloud services, the platform can track the users responsible for that activity along with other valuable metadata that the platform provides.

This allows Torque’s cost dashboard to provide reports showing cost by user, space (where user access is managed), cloud platform (AWS, Azure, GCP), cloud account, and other information.

While Torque does not replace the in-depth reporting of FinOps tools, the cost dashboard provides valuable context to make informed decisions about how DevOps, IT, and other teams operate cloud infrastructure.

Torque’s AI Copilot monitors the state of all cloud services deployed and automatically reviews the capacity the each service uses every hour. When a resource is inactive, Torque’s AI Copilot flags it as an idle resource, calculates the cost savings of terminating it, and adds it to a report listing all inactive resources.

This report provides FinOps and DevOps users the context to evaluate and act on opportunities to eliminate wasted cloud costs by terminating idle resources.

Torque executes the code to provision infrastructure, which allows the platform to allow or deny this activity based on custom policies set by administrators. Some examples include:

• Restricted instance sizes allows admins to deny any attempt to provision instance sizes that are not approved
• Maximum runtimes allow admins to deny the provisioning of any cloud resource for longer than is approved
• Maximum cost allow admins to deny provisioning based on the cost, which is calculated based on the resource size and duration of the deployment

Admins can choose to apply these policies to all users or just to those in select Spaces in Torque.

Torque can also trigger approval workflows, in which an administrator can quickly and easily approve a potential violation of a cost policy. This streamlines the provisioning of cloud infrastructure that is within budget while providing control over anything with potential to surpass cost constraints.

Full cloud cost capabilities in Torque are available for AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

Torque also supports various other public, on-premises, and hybrid cloud infrastructure tools.