Infrastructure Analyst Role

1. You are here:
2. Handbook
3. Engineering
4. Infrastructure
5. Cost Management
6. Infrastructure Analyst Role

Maintained by:

On this page

• Responsibilities
• Working with an infrastructure analyst
• Infra Analyst Board
• Learning Track

Responsibilities

• Optimize infra spend through committed spend programs and supporting enterprise contract deals
• Ad Hoc Analysis of Infrastructure hosting spend
• Dashboard and chart creation to improve observability into infrastructure costs
• Teaching and partnering with PM's and others on how to understand the cost and usage of their services

Working with an infrastructure analyst

There is no magic when reducing or analyzing infrastructure spend, it just requires a good understanding of what our own usage and architecture looks like and how we get billed for it.

Therefore, if requesting help or a review from an infrastructure analyst you should try to provide as much information as possible. Some of the most important pieces of information to provide are:

• description or link to architecture of affected services
• data Source of usage info and what metrics best relate to the cost if known
• Affected product and/or sku of service provider

If one or more of these is not known, then you should partner with the infrastructure analyst so you can define these together.

Infra Analyst Board

There is a separately maintained board for infra-analytics that is for ad-hoc requests specifically related to Infrastrutcture Analyst role Find more info at infra-analytics board handbook page

Learning Track

This section will go through the general skills that are needed to succeed as an infrastructure analyst. The skillset requires a mix of understanding that dips into three main areas: engineering, finance, and data.

• Understanding of major cloud vendors, how they bill, and how to analyze the bill.
  • Most cloud vendors will provide a granular billing report of your company's usage, so this is an important first step to understanding what the company is spending money on
  • Ability to quickly do ad-hoc analysis in any of the cloud vendor billing consoles
• Basic understanding of engineering concepts
  • An infrastructure analyst should know enough about how the applications your company uses to ask the right questions. This includes an understanding of general topics that affect resource utilization like multi-threading.
  • Can identify resource bottlenecks, areas of potential waste or excess usage, etc.
• Basic understanding of finance concepts
  • An infrastructure analyst needs to be comfortable with how finance departments work to be able to integrate with financial processes.
  • Familiar with forecast and cost allocation processes
• Understanding of data infrastructure
  • An infrastructure analyst should be able to work within whatever their company's current data architecture is, and enhance this with the unique data sources they have access to. This requires a greater level of maturity in the company and as a first step just using the cloud vendor billing consoles should suffice.
  • SQL expertise is baseline expectation, some experience with python/R as extra is preferred