"FinOps: the beginning" - now in the movie theaters

Good morning all,

First of all, a little introduction for the people who don't know me, so I am Ido, 36 years old, living in a little city in Israel called Yavne.

In the last ten years, I have been focusing on the public cloud, focusing on the Microsoft Azure platform since it was announced as a project called "red dog." 

I was one of the first and few people to implement public cloud solutions in Israel, and I was awarded a Microsoft Azure MVP for four years in a row.

I did many projects, from small to enormous scales workloads, inside and outside Israel, and I loved and still love every second of it.

In September, I made a drastic change and decided to move to Oracle. The reason for that was that I want to learn new technologies, additional cloud means additional knowledge, and I believe we can do great things in the local market.

One more thing, and then we can start; all the opinions and articles that I wrote here and will write in the future belong to me and represent me, not the company I work for. 

After the long introduction, let's deep dive into FinOps.

So FinOps, such as DevOps, is a methodology. Methodology, which provides guidelines about managing your financial connections to the cloud vendors end-to-end.

Many customers are approaching me to understand how to optimize their workloads in the cloud, as they think that the FinOps role is aiming only to reduce costs by optimizing their workloads.

Let me be loud and clear about it; Workload optimization is not FinOps. It's only one part of it. The aim of this FinOps, from my perspective, is to be in control of the spending, asking the right questions, for example:

1. Do we really need a specific region to build our services? Each region got its pricing. Does the customer require it?
2. Do we need a full-blown cluster to be built in case something goes wrong? Or can we go to a service that offers it by definition?
3. Does the workload need to run 24/7? Can we use a spot instance?

It's important to understand that a full-cycle needs to be involved here, not just an engineer who goes and presses the button. FinOps engineers should be a part of a center of excellence organization (stay tuned, I will write about it in my next article) and need to work very tightly with the solution architects and the product owners to define better the needs and requirements.

It's also important to understand that FinOps methodologies, by all means, are still in the creation stage, and as a direct result, the profession itself is very "young."

Fortunately, we got finops.org, which started to build the foundation for the methodologies, and they're expanding and building their trust in the community. So I suggest to everyone who wants to start with the profession to go to the website and learn. You will enjoy it.

By the basics, the FinOps journey consists of three iterative phases:

1. Inform - make each team accountable for their spending by providing them with clear visibility and information regarding what they are doing, make them responsible by settings targets, and Empower them to be in control.
2. Optimize - Cloud providers offer multiple levers to optimize. From Virtual Machines to Storage and other PaaS services. Make sure to use the vendor advisory tools.
3. Operate - Organizations start to continuously evaluate business objectives and the metrics they track against those objectives and how they are trending—measure business alignment on speed, quality, and cost. 

Organizational success is only possible if the organization builds a culture of FinOps. The idea is to be in control to feel comfortable moving more workloads to the cloud without losing control over the spending; without it, it's only a matter of time until the organization goes back to its on-premise.

To summarize:

When going to the cloud, it doesn't matter at which stage (Fully On-premise, hybrid, or entirely in the cloud) you are and to which company (Startups, ISVs, enterprises)you belong; you shall need to involve Finops in your cloud strategy. This is essential for your success as a company, being in control over the numbers, and eventually will help you negotiate with the cloud vendors.

Involve FinOps as a proactive stage in the planning of the strategy can save many costs, will help you shape your architecture better, and eventually will help your customer to profit from it as well (well, it depends on you as BDM)

I hope you enjoyed this article; stay tuned for the next one.

All the best,

Ido