Part of the power of the cloud is the change it allows in the way we can consume the latest technology at a global scale. It enables technology to be purchased by technical teams, at the variable levels needed to meet their requirements. However, this can also bring challenges in preventing cloud costs from spiraling out of control. So much so that a whole discipline called FinOps has emerged to describe cloud cost management and optimization.

At Strategic Blue our business is all about FinOps so we care passionately about it but we also appreciate that no organization ever moved to the cloud to become FinOps experts. It’s a large area that can be overwhelming, particularly in deciding how to prioritize your next steps. In this article we’ll introduce the concept of FinOps and we’ll provide a practical way of quickly bringing its benefits to your organization.
 

Key Takeaways:

1. Review the FinOps Domains: The structured approach of FinOps helps organizations optimize cloud spending through activities like understanding cloud usage and costs, performance tracking, real-time decision making, and cloud rate and usage optimization. Each of these is important, cannot be ignored and must be worked into day to day processes through a culture of ownership and accountability. They demonstrate what can be done and enable organizations to create their own path to adopting FinOps in a way that works for them.
2. Empower your engineers: In the cloud consumption model it’s easy to pass too much emphasis and responsibility to engineers. The competing priorities, time constraints and breadth of expertise demands of this can be overwhelming. When adding the need to enforce a layer of governance it’s understandable why empowering engineers to take action is regularly cited as a major FinOps pain point (the State of FinOps by the FinOps Foundation). Look for collaborative, cooperative approaches wherever possible to ease this burden and empower engineers to do what they do best.
3. Avoid being a jack of all trades, master of none: The FinOps Domains are broad and the capabilities they need to be delivered effectively require time, tools and culture to deliver. Prioritize carefully what needs your specific internal knowledge and what warrants attention, albeit not necessarily yours.

The FinOps Framework

Organizations are increasingly embracing cloud to drive innovation and streamline their operations. The FinOps Foundation developed the FinOps Framework to offer a structured approach to help organizations do this. They explain it in great detail but to summarize it briefly here we’ll use their overview diagram and “FinOps Domains”.