NAB targets 20 percent cut to cloud costs this year

NAB is targeting a 20 percent reduction in its cloud costs this year, a figure that shows the magnitude of the ambition for its cloud FinOps efforts.

The bank said back in February that 2022 would be a year where it tried to keep its cloud costs in check, by “rightsizing” instance types to workload requirements or shutting down unutilised resources.

CTO Steve Day later told the iTnews Podcast that switching off developer environments during holiday periods, and increasing its use of spot instances and Arm processor-based EC2 instances, had created cost savings.

Now, further details of the savings have been revealed in an AWS case study.

The blog post contains two important topline numbers - the targeted 20 percent reduction in cloud costs for 2022, but also a calculation that FinOps initiatives in their totality have led to “over $1 million per month” in savings.

The initiatives include two that Day spoke of in the podcast: the push to use more spot instances - effectively spare capacity in the AWS cloud - and to use instances based on Arm processors, in this case AWS Graviton processors.

These are estimared to be "saving about a million dollars per year". It's not clear what the other contributors to the "million dollars a month" figure are.

On spot instances, NAB has increased usage “from two percent in 2019 to around 17 percent in 2022.”

“About 26 percent of non-production workloads and an increasing number of critical applications, such as NAB’s trading platform, ran on spot instances in 2022,” the AWS case study states.

Additionally, the bank is said to have “increased its use of [Arm-based] AWS Graviton processors by 30 percent per year".

It now runs workloads and "large applications" such as its NAB data hub - which is the bank’s data lake - on Graviton-powered EC2 instances.