What is FinOps?
FinOps goals
Businesses spend thousands of dollars on IT infrastructure and are eager to gain full transparency of spending, achieve satisfactory unit economics metrics, and build a strong FinOps team of highly involved and motivated employees.
The FinOps strategy helps eliminate many challenges on the way to achieving these goals. The main idea of FinOps is to cut cloud costs simultaneously and build a flow that allows for the optimization of R&D processes and increases the efficiency of public cloud usage.
The main FinOps goals might be defined as the following:
- Optimize IT infrastructure expenses
- Identify waste of money and R&D process bottlenecks
- Bring observability
- Establish a long-term cost-saving process
- Engage engineers in cost-savings
FinOps team and responsibilities
Traditionally, someone from a top management team worries about cloud expenses, cloud budget forecasts, and optimization – it might be a CFO if there is such a position or CTO, CIO, and CEO in small and medium businesses. Typically, these people own cloud budgets in a company struggling with a total mess of cloud bills and trying to create an accurate forecast of cloud spending.
There might be a dedicated FinOps leader, but to achieve maximum efficiency, it’s recommended that the following titles be involved in the FinOps and cloud cost optimization processes.
- The Head of Finance (CFO) is responsible for the whole strategy, forecasting, and FinOps reporting
- IT Manager might be responsible for full infrastructure transparency and observability, resource usage optimization
- Team leads are to create a smooth FinOps process among their teams
- Architects, DevOps, and Engineers are responsible for their proper resource usage
How to engage engineers in FinOps and cloud cost savings
It’s efficient to ask engineers to do regular resource clean-ups, deactivate unnecessary resources (volumes, AMIs, snapshots, etc.), check VM rightsizing, and focus on reserved instances and some saving recommendations. This simple routine can help optimize cloud bills at once, but it can’t establish a system of proper resource usage and FinOps implementation.
When your engineering department is integral to a FinOps team, you’ll get improved R&D efficiency with a minimal and predictable infrastructure cost.
On a daily basis, they can help:
- Organize applications and resource usage – implement a convenient tagging system to assist with budget allocation. Map all costs among projects, teams, and business goals
- Optimize expenses for cloud and K8s workloads
- Follow budget constraints and get real-time alerts about budget exceeds
OptScale is a solution to enhance FinOps teamwork and speed up FinOps implementation. It helps organize shared workload usage, optimize & forecast Kubernetes and cloud costs, and engage engineers in cost savings. OptScale offers:
- AWS, Microsoft Azure, Alibaba cloud cost optimization
- K8s cost optimization
- Resource optimization for CI/CD jobs
- R&D cost allocation and cost delivery forecast
- IT environment management: shared environment planning and booking
- Cloud health monitoring
Are you struggling with cloud spend control? Test Environment Management helps tackle numerous challenges almost every modern tech company faces → ‘In our recent article, find out how proper Test Environment Management helps achieve cloud cost optimization goals.’
