Draft:Cloud FinOps
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Cloud FinOps, often abbreviated in FinOps, is a discipline born to help the financial, procurement and technical transition to Cloud Computing. Finance and procurement benefit from implementing FinOps practices as they support the changes from a financially predictable and technically unflexible CapEx model to a more financially unpredictable and more technically flexible OpEx one. Technical teams benefit from implementing FinOps practices by helping to move from an environment where computing power is scarce to one where it can be seen as infinite and always available; most non-cloud best practices require an update or a rewrite when moving to the cloud.
Most de-facto standards of FinOps originate from the community around the FinOps Foundation, a not-for-profit that includes the three biggest cloud vendors by market share (AWS, Azure, GCP), three of the Big four accounting firms, and 48 of the Fortune 50 companies[1].
Definition
"FinOps is an evolving cloud financial management discipline and cultural practice that enables organizations to get maximum business value by helping engineering, finance, technology and business teams to collaborate on data-driven spending decisions."[2]
Other definitions exist:
- AWS uses the term Cloud Financial Management.
- Google Cloud defines FinOps as An operational framework and cultural shift that brings technology, finance, and business together to drive financial accountability and accelerate business value realization through cloud transformation.[3]
Possible confusion with Financial Operations
Cloud FinOps is not Financial Operations, nor is it solely an operating model to cut cloud costs. "FinOps is a portmanteau of “Finance” and “DevOps”, stressing the communications and collaboration between business and engineering teams.
The Financial Operation department, also abbreviated in FinOps, predates Cloud FinOps. When confusiong between the term FinOps exists, using Cloud FinOps, as oppose to simply FinOps, allows for a simple clarification.
The origin of the term FinOps
From the Cloud FinOps book[4], in the "Where Did FinOps Come From?" section, J.R. Storment first spoke about the concept of FinOps in a DevSecOps talk at an AWS Public Sector Summit in DC in 2016[5]. While there is no actual date that the term was first used, it is said that someone at Spotify coined the term around that same period.
Certifications
There are FinOps certifications for individuals.[6]
- FinOps Certified Practioner.
- FinOps Certified Professional
- FinOps Certified Engineer
Value Proposition
Framework
There is an open-source FinOps Framework available on the FinOps Foundation website. The framework is constantly updated from the experience of the community.
The FinOps Framework provides the operating model for how to establish and excel in the practice of FinOps. Like FinOps, the Framework is evolving and informed by community experiences, contributions, and conversations. It’s built by the community, for the community.[7]
Challenges and limitations
- Challenges
- Billing datasets are complicated
- Billing datasets are vary large - too big for spreadsheets
- FinOps teams/functions are often established/started as a reactionary measure to ballooning Cloud costs, it can be hard to get ones arms around the problem "After the horse has bolted"
- FinOps skills can be in short supply
- It requires mindset/behaviour changes across a significant number of personas within the organisation
- Executive/Finance folks need to become comfortable with the variable cost model
- Engineers need to deploy resources in a cost conscious manner
- Architects need to design with cost in mind
- Procurement teams need to engage with Cloud vendors in a different way to agree contractual terms
References
- ^ "FinOps Foundation Members". Retrieved 2023-11-15.
- ^ "FinOps Foundation - What is FinOps?". Retrieved 2023-11-10.
- ^ "What is Cloud FinOps?". Google Cloud. Retrieved 2023-11-10.
- ^ "1. What Is FinOps? - Cloud FinOps [Book]". www.oreilly.com. Retrieved 2023-11-14.
- ^ Leveraging Cloud Transformation to Build a DevOps Culture | AWS Public Sector Summit 2016, retrieved 2023-11-14
- ^ "FinOps Certification and Training". FinOps Foundation, a Linux Foundation program. Retrieved 2023-11-15.
- ^ "FinOps Framework Overview". Retrieved 2023-11-15.