FinOps – Way to save money or making more of it ?

If it seems that FinOps is about saving money, then think again. FinOps is about making money. -Cloud FinOps Book

Let us have a deeper look into it!
Within IT FinOps nowadays is grabbing a lot of attention, so question is what exactly FinOps is?
Short of financial operations, FinOps is a management practice such incorporated so as to promote shared responsibility within any organisation's cloud computing infrastructure and costs. Basically it is a practice to support any organisation to manage it's cloud expenditure in such a manner that it can boost business in a limited expenditure.

Let us see these principles in a little details:

Visibility: This collaboration of financial management with Operations gives us a clearer picture of which all services are running, giving a rundown cost of them all, of course there are certain build-in services on cloud platforms dedicated to provide this insight. This transparency helps us evaluate by identifying which all services are mapped to any particular service and its needfulness within the team. This will help us to cut do any resources which are untagged or in plain terms not needed by the team, also will help to create budgets and forecast further costing.

Optimisation: Cloud optimization is not a one time solution to the whole infra, rather it needs to be revised and re-revised as per changing needs of the team. AWS uses https://calculator.aws/#/ to display the cost for any running architecture. Few ways via which optimisation could be done :

1. A basic approach will be to eliminate all unused resourses
2. Storage and network traffic checks; all the unused data stored in bucket or any kind of inbound/outbound traffic across regions can make a deeper dent to your pockets.
3. Certain availability zones have services running cheaper than other, so checking on the services according to zones might cut costs to a significant level.
4. VM-flavouring : Some of the VM flavours are significantly lower in prices as compared to others.

Control: Being able to see previous spends and forecast a new budget based on the usage is one way of financial hold. As we all know each project is allocated a certain budget within which the team needs to work in such manner that the project requirements are all well met, this could be done breaking the budget in smaller division each dedicated to a a specific set of tasks. These tasks are further allocated to a single owner who could look over the needs and deeds of that specific devision.

Collaboration: There can be no room for optimised development without interactive feedbacks. In cloud computing, people don’t only interact within a team of engineers or within one department, but employ cross-functional collaboration with a company where engineers, operational, finance and executive teams are involved. This helps in building up a user strategy by reviewing and adjusting different practice methodologies and budget adjustments.

Attaching below a blog study done by Amazon Web Services on the same:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/enterprise-strategy/introducing-finops-excuse-me-devsecfinbizops/

Lets look on FinOps by a more practical example on our next blog!

Stay tuned!!