Are you ready for FinOps Cloud?

FinOps will give you financial accountability to cloud spends

As you’ve been already very familiar with DevOps, DevSecOps, but perhaps not FinOps. This term is derived from Financial and Operations in cloud management. You will usually see this when your company talks about cloud cost optimization.

Commonly, Finance is concerned about the money and cost, and Ops (maybe they are but) thinks about how they can make the cloud more reliable and smooth change management in the cloud environment. Lastly Dev, hm… most of them don’t care about the cost unless they will be under high pressure by the finance team or their boss.

When it comes to FinOps, they must work together very closely, which they probably never tried before. So to speak, FinOps is more cultural stuff and how they work on managing the cloud cost.

In practice wise, FinOps can be gained by a good combination of

• Real-time monitoring
• Automated (Just-in-time) process
• One team decision

Real-time monitoring

There will be many types of reporting and monitoring for FinOps. You will need to have cloud cost real-time monitoring and system’s one. It will provide visibility to the FinOps team (Fin + Dev + Ops) of the cost changes (spikes) and system status. Many companies may already have tons of dashboards to know when your system will be exhausted, but may not have the real-time cost dashboard.

Same as the investment bank who must know the money flow reflecting the entire & individual finance flows, FinOps also needs to know where your money is spent and it will really generate the values to your company. (Tagging will be good practice if you have multiple services)

Automated (Just-in-time) process

Let’s imagine, you found some abnormal status of your cost dashboard, and your finance team will be aware of the strange phenomenon and investigate it for 5 days, and ask Dev/Ops team to handle that which will take another 10 days. Now you will lose the biggest benefit of using the cloud. (Vs data center)

Just-in-time & automated processes will need to be applied in many decision points. For instance, 1) Change your instance types 2) More/Less instance 3) Alert system 4) financial decisions.

One Team Decision

Working as one team can be never ignored. Sometimes top mgmt structures the teams and comprehensive processes upon the teams, and expect them to work on their part well. Yes, they will do. But not for FinOps if they are not willing to understand each other's pie (interest). For example, for Operations, they will be more reliable and good-performance system so requires higher & higher specs of instances, the engineers agree with that but put more/higher instances because they may not want to get another change request, and lastly finance now feels bad on the cost. This is really typical interest conflict between teams. (Let me talk about this, how we can achieve more one-team-spirit)

Now, let’s test how much your company is ready for FinOps!

Q1: All cloud-related changes are based on the business value they will generate?

Q2: Dev/Ops team who owns the cloud system really care about the cost the company spends? (Ownership)

Q3: Finance, Dev, Ops really work and make decisions together? (Virtual one team) (Or Finance has a top-down strategy saying “you must reduce your cloud cost by 30%”

Q4: How many times do you change your instance types, size of the database, etc.? Or you just provisioned very enough for the business.

Q5: Where is your data storage, did you ever consider the cost per data? (Remember the slow data storage is much cheaper, do you really need the fastest one for your data that is 3 months ago?)

Hopefully, you can answer “yes” for most of them.