inOps, short for Financial Operations, is a discipline and a set of practices focused on managing the financial aspects of cloud computing.

Editor's Notes

• #3: The FinOps Foundation is a project of the Linux Foundation. We’re here to Advance the people who manage the value of cloud. We do that through three primary mechanisms Connections and Community - Events, Meetups, monthly Summits, Community Calls, our Practitioner Slack channel, and of course our annual FinOps X and XE events Education & Certification - Take Free training in an Intro to FinOps or FOCUS, become a FinOps Certified Practitioner, Engineer, FOCUS Analyst, or Professional; take Persona-based training or if paying for these is a burden to you, apply for scholarships to attend. Best Practices & Standards - the FinOps Framework, FinOps Asset Library, FinOps Landscape and other tools allow you to grow and mature your FinOps practice with insights from others, and then collaborate with them in FinOps working groups and Special Interest Groups
• #4: Cloud is critical to success by bringing The new cloud economy has us facing some new realities in the IT world: Traditional procurement silos have broken down, buying is decentralized, and it’s only getting more so Cloud adoption, once the purview of CTOs and the location of science-fair projects now represents MATERIAL and substantial costs for many companies, and it’s only growing What you buy in the cloud is variable, it changes month to month, day to day, minute to minute. It’s not predictable, and it’s hard to forecast well using traditional methods. And with over 1M Cloud SKUs out there, it’s only getting more complex. In a cloud world of vast supply, plentiful options and few constraints on your spending, inefficiency is inevitable. But all businesses must focus on efficiency, and need the information to create it. Further, macroeconomic pressures – elections, Brexit, and the coming economic downturn (eventually there will be one) – require even more ruthless efficiency measures. Inefficiency becomes a target on IT’s back (very important) in a downturn. Luckily, there’s also a new operating model for the cloud to help address these realities.
• #5: Official home(s) of the FinOps Definition: https://www.finops.org/introduction/what-is-finops/ https://github.com/finopsfoundation/definition/blob/main/definition_of_finops.md FinOps is an operational framework and cultural practice which maximizes the business value of cloud, enables timely data-driven decision making, and creates financial accountability through collaboration between engineering, finance. and business teams. Areas to Highlight: It is both an operational framework and a cultural practice. The level of collaboration between engineering and finance required to successfully use the cloud is far greater than ever required in data center IT. Value, not cost, is of primary importance in FinOps Decision-making must be faster than ever, continuous, and based on the analysis of vast quantities of data from multiple sources Ultimately Financial Accountability is everyone’s responsibility, to allow organizations to plan, forecast, budget, and allocate cloud costs correctly Everyone must be involved in creating the culture of accountability: Engineering, Finance, Product teams, Leadership, Procurement, and Allied Personas in Security, ITAM, Sustainability and operations groups Note: Cloud FinOps as a term is not shorthand for Financial Operations, it is a portmanteau of the terms Finance and DevOps, the two key parts of the organization that must collaborate completely
• #7: https://www.finops.org/framework/
• #8: There are currently six components of the FinOps Framework: Principles - drive our FinOps practices Personas - stakeholders that FinOps supports Domains - fundamental business outcomes Capabilities - activities performed to achieve desired outcomes (Domains) of FinOps Phases - iterative process model for exercising FinOps Capabilities Maturity Model - incremental assessment criteria for understanding the state of any FinOps activity or overall practice
• #9: https://www.finops.org/framework/personas/
• #10: The Framework Personas have been expanded and grouped into Core and Allied Personas. CORE PERSONAS The organizational roles for the Core Personas that are directly involved in the practice of FinOps have remained unchanged. However, the names for the "Engineering & Operations" Persona and the "Business/Product Owner" Persona have been simplified to "Engineering" and "Product" respectively to better represent areas of FinOps activity rather than specific roles titles. The "Executive" Persona has been renamed to "Leadership" to reflect that organizational alignment across all leadership roles is needed to overcome FinOps challenges and connect technology decisions with business outcomes. ALLIED PERSONAS The Framework now includes Allied Personas. Allied Personas are stakeholders with whom the Core Personas may coordinate or collaborate when practicing FinOps. Allied Personas align to the Framework Capability Intersecting Disciplines and represent the category of people that work within that discipline. Not every organization will have these Allied Personas, but for those that do, it is important to understand how the FinOps practice will interact with them to deliver value to the organization. Sustainability Practitioner within IT and ITAM Leader/Practitioner were simplified to Sustainability and ITAM (IT Asset Management) respectively to represent these areas of FinOps activity rather than job titles. Three new Allied Personas represent each of these intersecting disciplines: ITFM/TBM (Information Technology Financial Management / Technology Business Management) IT Security (Information Technology Security) ITSM / ITIL (Information Technology Service Management / Information Technology Infrastructure Library)
• #12: https://data.finops.org/#11900
• #13: https://data.finops.org/#11759
• #17: Key Point: FOCUS is an open-source specification that defines how cloud vendors can format cost and usage billing data uniformly. Talk Track: FOCUS is a specification. Or a Spec for short. And a specification specifies how something should be. So it specifies how cloud bills should be formatted. It tells people who sell cloud products how they should format the bills that they send to their customers. This specification is an open-source one, meaning anyone in the community can participate in building and maintaining it. And it’s free to use. It’s not sold or commercialized. Our tagline for FOCUS is: The unifying format for cloud bills. You’ll see that on a big pop up banner at X. When we say FOCUS specifies how to format the bill, we are columns in the billing data file, and the data in those columns. The FOCUS spec currently defines 43 columns. You can see a snippet of a billing data file on the right. Billed Cost is one of the columns that FOCUS defines. For each of those columns it tells us how the column should be written in the file - that’s called the column ID. There is also a more reader-friendly name with a space between the words. And it has a description, so everyone understands that, for example, Billed Cost is the amount that shows up on your bill at the end of each month, and it doesn’t have charges amortized, but it does include any discounts you are eligible for that month. And it also tells us how to format the data that goes into the column itself. The idea here is that all cloud vendors use these same columns and formats for data. So practitioners don’t have to spend time figuring out if for example, “Billed Cost” on one invoice and “Invoice Charge” on another invoice mean the same thing. They won’t have to worry about, for example, whether or not one of those terms includes amortized costs or discounts and the other doesn’t. Everyone will use the same terms and they will all mean the same thing.
• #18: Key Point: Deliver the solution statement. Talk Track: FOCUS solves this problem. With FOCUS, everyone is making files in the same format, so Practitioners don’t have to spend all that time normalizing files from different vendors. It makes their jobs easier. FOCUS has a lot of benefits for practitioners and their organizations, but it is also beneficial for cloud vendors and finops vendors. Let’s walk through the benefits for each of these 3 groups.
• #20: The FinOps framework is maintained by the FinOps Foundation which is a program of the Linux Foundation, it’s mission is to advance the people who manage the value of cloud. The FinOps community develops and shares its best practices for others… https://www.finops.org/about/