Rebuilding Cost Models:�
How FinOps Helped APTrust Shape a Sustainable Business Strategy for Long-Term Preservation
Allison C.F. Ruffner
Lead Engineer for DevSecOps
@Academic Preservation Trust
A Bit About Me
Why does this matter? �
The Story Line
In 2024 APTrust, a consortium-based digital preservation service, was facing an inflection point: our longstanding model, built on a flat $20,000 annual membership fee and low rates for additional storage, would soon fail to cover the full costs of cloud and organizational operations. For 10 years APTrust membership fees had not changed, but the cost to deliver had increased. This necessitated a deep dive into cloud costs and other expenditures. The power of practicing FinOps was such that even at the crawl, it helped us shape a sustainable future.
“FinOps is an operational framework and cultural practice which maximizes the business value of cloud and technology, enables timely data-driven decision making, and creates financial accountability through collaboration between engineering, finance, and business teams.”��FinOps Foundation Technical Advisory Council�Updated: January 2025
What Is FinOps?
Lean Management For Cloud Computing
“Every engineering decision is a buying decision.”� - Erik Peterson CTO/CISO @CloudZero
FinOps Capabilities In Today’s Presentation
Rate Optimization
Architecting for the Cloud
Workload Optimization
Allocation
Unit Economics
Reporting
Introducing APTrust
01
Digital preservation operating 100% in the cloud.
Preserving the Scholarly and Cultural Record
A consortium of 20+ universities and memory institutions within the US.
Who We Are:
How APTrust Works
Extending the useful life and unique materials so they are accessible for future generations of students and researchers.
Preservation Services
Registry
How APTrust Works
Preservation Services
Member bucket
Glacier
Deep Archive
S3
Glacier
Deep Archive
How APTrust Works
Registry
Manage preserved items in the repository via a Web UI and API
Source | $ | Description |
Sustaining Membership | $20,000/year | Includes 10 TB storage allowance. |
Standard Storage | $420/year/TB | This fee is assessed per gigabyte of content at $0.41016. |
Glacier | $60/year/TB | This fee is assessed per gigabyte of content at $0.05859. *added 2018 |
Deep Archive | $20/year/TB | This fee is assessed per gigabyte of content at $0.01953. *added 2018 |
UVA Subsidy | $400,000/year | *Reduced to $200,000/year for FY 2026 |
APTrust collects revenues only to meet the cost of operating APTrust and maintaining a reserve fund adequate to cover the costs of sunsetting the organization.
Fees & Cost Recovery
The Early Years
02
Forecasting
Budgeting
Planning & Estimating
2011 - 2019
Preservation Is A Long Game
APTrust began like a ‘shift and lift’ even though it began in the cloud. Founding members placed development constraints based on concerns over cloud immaturity, vendor lock, and vendor abandonment. Portability back to a member data center or local system was a must have requirement.
Legacy Architecture
Traditional monolithic architecture using IaaS deployed as a “shift and lift” strategy.
Challenges with Architecture.
Planning & Forecasting
Cloud Costs 2015 | |
|
Estimated Storage Monthly | $6013.90 | 160TBs |
Estimated Storage Add Monthly | $199.68 | 5TB blocks |
Infrastructure Charge of 13% | $637.9 | 13% Charge |
Management Fee | $357.59 | 5% Charge |
S3 POST, GET, etc charges | $500 | * wild guess |
Total Storage Monthly | $6513.90 |
|
Total Costs Monthly Estimates | $7509.39 |
|
Total Costs Annual Estimated | $90112.68 | |
The lack of data from the legacy environment limited the ability to get a clear understanding or allocate cloud costs.
Architecting for the Cloud
03
Going Cloud Native
Allocation
Workload Optimization
Rate Optimization
2020 - 2023
Optimization, Value, & Culture
The period from 2020 – 2023 was a period of significant modernization for the APTrust preservation platform as it moved to a cloud native architecture and application design. The need for a more secure, cost efficient, time efficient, scalable, supportable and sustainable environment drove effort, while presenting opportunities to use FinOps strategies/capabilities from initial design.
What the APTrust Team Desired
Challenges The Team Faced
Transitioning from EBS to S3 storage for data streaming processing and data transformation was a uniquely innovative solution for APTrust with a combination of benefits.
Due to tagging we discovered our spending on storage for data processing with EBS dropped from ~250$/month to ~85$/month. This was a 66% drop in spending.
Data Streaming Processing On S3
Link to AWS’ 2022 S3 Deep Dive here to see how this actually works.
* Fargate and our microservices were a particularly powerful combination for exploring value and FinOps.
Cloud Native technologies enabled APTrust to meet its challenges and find value with an efficient balanced solution, aided by thinking lean while positioning it for future maturity with FinOps.
Microservices & Paas
PaaS platforms provided a great hosting solution for APTrust’s microservices architecture while thinking about simplification for cost efficiency and being lean.
Microservices and Paas
*APTrust could now see they spent 12$/month on fixity checks in the new architecture in prod. Fixity is a critical process for preservation ops.
Lexicons, Tags, & Allocation
ENV Tags | | |
| Environment | staging |
| Environment | demo |
| Environment | prod |
| Environment | poc-<number> |
| Environment | aptrust |
Service Tags | | |
| Product | preserv |
| Product | nsq |
| Product | registry |
| Service | elasticache |
| Service | rds |
| Service | alb |
| Service | nat |
A critical strategy to gain visibility, identify assets and allocate costs to the relevant business process was integrating a tagging solution into the lexicon defining the environment. Tagging is an essential component of allocation for aligning cloud costs with business value.
Inflection Point
05
Unit Economics
Allocation
TOC
2024
Signals
In 2024, APTrust observed signals that combined to indicate the revenue stream and storage cost recovery model would no longer cover expenses.
APTrust had to address challenges from expenditures and budgeting based on what we were observing in the environment. We had to come up with new ways of thinking about how cost recovery was done, and how it should be allocated. Because of efforts earlier efforts with Allocation and Architecting for the Cloud would could now dig much deeper into the data and focus more on Unit Economics.
Signals
Digging Into Cloud Costs
2024 Environment operational costs - does not include storage or AWS Support costs.
�
| Staging | Demo | Production |
Monthly | $239 | $269 | $1,087 |
Year | $2868 | $3228 | $13,044 |
Glacier | Glacier Deep | S3 | S3 IA | S3 RR |
2951.58GB | 4153.12GB | 13285.9GB | 112.74GB | 2.924GB |
~$200 | ~$50 | ~$3667 | ~$17 | ~$1 |
Overhead annual storage costs based on Oct 1, 2024. - Storage for demo,staging, and ops not included in membership billed storage amounts.
�
TOC IT Supply Chain & Unit Economics
Developing a True Ownership Cost by aggregating IT expenditures that went to providing preservation services for APTrust; ingesting, storing, and maintaining.
�
AWS Ops Adjusted for 2025 | $2442.91 |
|
Total Overhead Storage Cost | $327.76 |
|
Software LifeCycle Support Services | $344.37 |
|
Monthly Overhead Cost | $3115.04 |
|
AWS Business Support (%10) | $800.00 |
|
Total Monthly Overhead Costs | $3426.45 |
|
Total GBs of Membership Storage (Oct 1) | 743,713.869 |
|
Overhead/GB Monthly | $0.0053 |
|
Overhead/GB Annual | $0.0636 | $65.13/TB |
A New Cost Model
06
Unit Economics
Reporting
TOC
2025 and Beyond
IT Cost Recovery Model
Operations Support Tech Costs (OSTC) | $344.37 |
Cloud Infra Overhead Costs (CIOC) | $2978.66 |
Overhead Storage Cost (OSC) | $214.74 |
Business Support Costs (BSC) | $850 |
Total | $4,390.77 |
TMS (Total Membership Storage) | 861,932.498 (GB) |
Overhead Cost/GB/Month | $0.0051 (62.67/TB) |
(OSTC + CIOC + OSC + BSC) / TMS
(Operations Support Tech Costs + Cloud Infra Overhead Costs + Overhead Storage Cost + Business Support Costs) / Total Membership Storage
The cost of preservation services per GB of storage.
Reporting
Fiscal Years 2025 - 2032
The APTrust Executive Director proposes fees for all services, with input from the Advisory Committee, and the APTrust Governing Board approves them. The additional layers of data helped APTrust’s Members understand the relationship between the business value of preservation and cloud costs.
Storage price increases, no Sustaining Membership fee change.
Storage price increase, Sustaining Membership fee increase to $25,000
Though this data was was centered on high level aggregated costs, the deepest data level isn’t required to make clear and impactful decisions. Membership was able to walk through APTrust’s option of future fee strategies.
Deep Archive: $80/TB/Year ($60 increase, 103.53% cost recovery)�
Proposed Fees For FY 2027
New Membership Fee: July 1, 2027 (May 2027 invoices, due August, FY28)
New Storage Fees: April 1, 2027 (May 2028 invoices, due August, FY 29)
Consulting
Glacier: $110/TB/Year ($50 increase, 100.48% cost recovery)�
High Assurance: $460/TB/Year ($40 increase, 100.53% cost recovery)�
Membership Fee: $25,000�
*** Not yet approved by the Board. A vote is expected in February of 2026. ***
Proposed Timeline:
Final Thoughts
FinOps provides transparency. The more you see, the more waste gets removed, the easier to find value. Engineering in ways to support transparency makes your cloud ops that much leaner.
Being able to report the data and metrics around IT costs and the cost of preservation was very powerful for addressing APTrust’s cost challenges with our Membership and APTrust Board.
Don’t overcomplicate things. Keep it simple. The deepest data level isn’t required for effective decision making. Be lean with your own time.
Financial accountability is a collaborative activity. Wearing multiple hats helps, but APTrust’s team worked closely to engineer a cost-effective cloud stack capable of providing granular data for FinOps actions.
Thanks!
#finops
#cloud
#preservation