So you’re an AWS Consulting Partner doing AWS Well-Architected Framework Reviews (WAFRs), and you’re looking at nOps to help you do more of them, better and faster.

You want to have confidence that it’s going to make your life better. What if you could not only say using nOps was better but also, “Using nOps for WAFR is better by this much!”

That’s what a Return On Investment (ROI) forecast can do for you. And this article tells you how to do it, what you can aim for, and a link to the new nOps AWS Cloud ROI and Pricing Calculator so you can do it yourself.

What can an ROI forecast tell you?

There is one qualitative question that an ROI needs to answer :

— “Will I be better off by using nOps for cloud management and WAFR — yes, or no?

The answer is “Yes,” but any skeptic will follow up with:

— “Why? And by how much?” 

You can answer these questions using the nOps AWS Cloud ROI and Pricing Calculator and just a few inputs specific to your situation. You can answer your own questions and the skeptics’ challenges with: 

“Here is a forecast of the money and time we will save, and how long it will take.”

Money saved Time saved Over what time period
❗Key point: The ROI Calculator only focuses on savings.

Another important ROI measure is the increased growth of your AWS consulting business because nOps enables you to handle more customers and do more remediations faster:

  1. Add more customers and opportunities: increase partner standing with AWS.
  2. Complete more remediations: increase consulting revenue.
  3. Improve customer service: happier customers and higher Net Promoter Score

Get yourself a cup of your favorite beverage. By the time you’ve drained your cup, you’ll have a model of what time and money savings you’ll make by using nOps for AWS Well-Architected Framework Reviews (WAFR).

How? Using our simple criteria and the new nOps AWS Cloud ROI and Pricing Calculator.

How to create a WAFR ROI with the nOps AWS Cloud ROI and Pricing Calculator

The way to generate an ROI forecast is to prepare proper inputs for your situation then use consistent formulas to model the impact of your inputs on the ROI.

The nOps AWS Cloud ROI and Pricing Calculator is modeled on the simple premise that the more AWS spend you have and the more Solutions Architects involved in this work, the bigger the savings you will have in terms of daily tasks, monthly cash savings, and yearly effort.

Of course, life is more complicated than simple models and your mileage may vary, but that doesn’t mean models are useless: just use them to gauge and don’t be a slave to them or try to be perfect or over-accurate. 

The default inputs we’ve provided are such a common industry rule of thumb that most cloud management products are priced on these well-known indicators. And if you don’t like them, you can override them!

The nOps AWS Cloud ROI and Pricing Calculator inputs and outputs

Each of the calculator inputs is explained to help you override the defaults where it makes sense to your situation. 

About Your Organization

AWS Monthly Recurring Revenue The larger this is, the more complex the environment and potentially, the bigger the savings through recommendations like Cost Optimization.
Employee Avg. Hourly Rate This should be the fully loaded rate, more like a contractor’s hourly rate than that of a full-time employee. A typical current US rate for some qualified to analyze and remediate AWS — a professional Cloud Architect — is $150/hour.
Number of DevOps/Cloud Engs. The staff qualified to analyze and remediate AWS using nOps plus their skills and experience.

Savings and Efficiencies

Daily Time Saved Swapping manual processes for automated ones with nOps, including time saved preparing reports, can be a huge time-saver, freeing up time for other projects.
Monthly Unused Resources Saved By turning AWS services like Amazon EC2 off when not in use, like development resources when developers aren’t working.
Monthly Rightsizing Savings By tuning the size of Amazon EC2 instances down to match the workload.
Monthly Reserved Instance Savings By purchasing Amazon EC2 in advance.
Yearly Hours Saved in Engineering Time Analysis, audits, reports are faster and higher quality with far less thinking time and rework.

Best practice: Create worst case, most likely, best case ROI scenarios

In the nOps AWS Cloud ROI and Pricing Calculator, each of these inputs has a realistic default that you can change to suit your needs.

However, some people like to produce three forecasts using different ranges of inputs to represent the two edge cases — worst and best case — and the one in the middle — most likely.

Example ROI savings and benefits 

Using the nOps AWS Cloud ROI and Pricing Calculator defaults, you will get the following savings outputs:

Yearly Productivity Savings The time that nOps frees up by making life simpler and faster for engineers for daily tasks. I can either save the money or redeploy staff to more strategic activities.
Yearly Cost Optimization Savings Through unused, underused, and Reserved Instance optimizations, I can reduce the AWS bill by this much.
Yearly Change Management Savings Because nOps does the heavy lifting on audit and compliance, this is the staff savings for these activities. I could cut this cost or redeploy staff.
Yearly Projected Savings – this is the 12-month ROI Quantifiable monetary saving.

Using the output from the nOps AWS Cloud ROI and Pricing Calculator

The last step is to go back to the first question: “Will I benefit from using nOps? If so, by how much?”

Now you know that the forecast answer is that you will save $115.5K. The cost of nOps is a fraction of that (around 1%). 

So the answer is, “Yes.”

Get started with the nOps AWS Cloud ROI and Pricing Calculator

The calculator is free to use and you don’t have to sign up to use it.

  1. Go to the nOps AWS Cloud ROI and Pricing Calculator page
  2. Override the defaults — commonly, this is the first three inputs of MRR, Hourly Rate, Number of engineers.
  3. Consider producing three models
    1. Worst case (pessimistic, lowest savings)
    2. Most likely (accurate)
    3. Best case (optimistic, highest savings)