FinOps helps you mitigate Cloud Spends by having (1) one central team of FinOps practitioners and (2) the rest of the engineering teams decentralized.
The one central team of FinOps practitioners is in charge of
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providing a central Cloud Monitoring solution to real-time monitor your Cloud Spends with a very thin granularity (team-level) via heavy use of tags and automation;
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identifying potential for savings (e.g. idle instances);
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negotiating commitments and rates with Cloud Vendors (can help you saving up to 50% of Cloud Spends).
The rest of the engineering teams decentralized are aiming at
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optimizing their Cloud usage against the efficiency metrics displayed by the monitoring solution;
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challenging and implementing the FinOps practitioners’ recommendations;
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re-allocating the spared budget on what truly matter (e.g. hiring new talents).
Cloud Spends = Usage x Rate
The formula for the Cloud Spends is the following: Cloud Spends = Usage x Rate.
With this in mind, the goal is to push cost-related accountability to the edges, having the expert teams managing their Cloud usage and having the central FinOps team gathering the organizational needs and negotiating global commitments out of it.
The main point of FinOps is not about saving costs but rather spending more on what truly matter for the business.
Outrun the common Cloud horror-story
FinOps will help you to retrieve visibility, predictability and budgetisation over Cloud spends and thus, opposes the common Cloud horror story:
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Teams start their journey onto the Cloud. They love the scalability, high availability, and increased speed to innovation the tool brings.
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Quickly, Cloud bills start skyrocketing out of control due to the lightly governed nature of Cloud spends.
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Afraid, the Cloud adventure is brutally dampened after the last of too many wake-up call, leading to (a) a waterfall approach, (b) mixed and sometime conflicting cloud cost reductions strategies and (c) no trust and the Cloud solutions anymore.