Overview

Create and publish processes that bring visibility to the project's AWS costs, provide a mechanism for approving major changes to AWS usage, and eliminate unnecessary spending.

Motivation

Each year, the Community Council establishes a budget for the FOLIO Project.  A substantial part of that budget covers the costs associated with the project's tools and hosted environments on AWS.  Tools include the project's Jira/Confluence instances, Jenkins, and similar applications.  Hosted environments include the release reference environments, snapshot environments, and developer environments. The Technical Council established this subgroup to create oversight mechanisms for the project's spending on AWS services.

Expected Deliverables

1. Define a process for requesting, reviewing, approving, and documenting new tools and FOLIO environments as well as the addition of new AWS services to the project
2. Define a process for reviewing existing tools and environments for candidates to be shut down (e.g. when a team leaves the project or the env is no longer needed)
3. Identify who is responsible for each part of these processes and what reporting requirements are needed
4. Define guidelines/best practices around pausing/stopping environments when they're not in use - e.g. off-hours/weekends/etc.
5. Create AWS Budgets and AWS Budget Alerts for daily and monthly spend rates
6. Explore AWS Cost Anomaly Detection and Rightsizing Recommendations

Completed (Draft) Deliverables 

• AWS Environment Lifecycle addresses deliverables #1, #2 and some of #3.
• AWS Cost Review Group addresses the remainder of deliverable #3.
• Off-hour Environment Downscale addresses deliverable #4.
• AWS Budgets, Budget Alerts, Cost Anomaly Detection, and Rightsizing Recommendations addresses deliverables #5 and #6.

Target End Date and Expected Effort

The group re-formed in April 2023 and expects to complete its work during Summer 2023.

Members

Peter Murray, Mark Veksler Maccabee Levine Steffen Köhler  Yogesh Kumar