FINOPS Europe Community Day
By Anderson Oliveira
On March 21st, 2023, I had the opportunity to speak at the first FinOps Community Day Europe at the BIMHUIS center in Amsterdam. The event was fully sold-out, with more than 200 people, among practitioners, vendors, and FinOps Foundation staff. We were all gathered around one topic, with many branches: Cloud cost optimisation.
I participated in the panel that discussed the State-of-FinOps 2023 survey results, with a view on the Europe context. From the many topics of the survey, three were selected for discussion: Main FinOps Challenges, Reporting Structure, and Sustainability.
On the challenges, the top ones for Europe are somehow related to culture. I had the chance to share about the successful FinOps adoption in FARFETCH, where the cultural shift made a difference. By rebranding the former “Cost and Compliance” to “FinOps”, we could communicate more effectively that teams were accountable for cloud costs. At the same time, FinOps Team drove cost optimisation by providing training, timely data visibility, and recognition of good cost optimization practices.
On the reporting line, we were also aligned with most of the industry by having FinOps inside the CTO line of reporting. Regarding carbon emissions, this is something that the FinOps Foundation and the industry is still trying to figure out what are the responsibilities of the companies and public cloud service providers on greenhouse gas emissions. One thing seems to be a common understanding: by optimizing cloud workloads, the industry is able to contribute to emissions reductions.
From the many interesting discussions and presentations, I would highlight two:
FOCUS project, which is an initiative with the objective of creating a united protocol for cloud usage and cost. It counts with the participation of the three main cloud providers: Azure, GCP, and AWS. The outcome of this project is something that we are very interested in as it will help not only FARFETCH but all multi-cloud companies simplify the data analysis.
The second interesting announcement was the release of FinOps Maturity Model. An online tool that will help organizations, departments, and teams to assess their maturity on FinOps practices and compare their progress over time.
Other than that, what stands out is the contact with people from different industries that are facing the same challenges that we are, with the chance to exchange ideas and strengthen our network. FinOps Foundation expressed their desire to have greater participation of Europe in FinOps on the knowledge base of this global and exponentially growing discipline.
FARFETCH contributes to this by helping produce standard materials that are used to help practitioners worldwide start their FinOps journey. This material is also present on the FinOps Practitioner Exam as a reference.
Adopting FinOps — Getting Started
Adopting FinOps — Pitfalls to Avoid
In the end, almost a grand finale. I was able to have my copy of the new released second edition of Cloud FinOps book autographed by its authors, JR Storment, and Mike Fuller, that attended the event in person.
Keep optimizing. Every dollar counts.
Originally published at https://www.farfetchtechblog.com on April 26th, 2023.
