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Learning more about FinOps on Google Cloud

Peter Billen
Google Cloud - Community
Published in
14 min readFeb 28, 2023

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In this article, I follow up on my previous post Introduction to FinOps on Google Cloud with a list of useful resources to learn more. FinOps is becoming more important and relevant with cloud computing growing while organizations need to respond to economic uncertainties. The Fourth Quarter 2022 Google Cloud Brand Pulse Survey emphasizes this as an important aspect to reach long-term business resilience. The aim of this collection is not to be exhaustive, rather to bring together many materials starting from the basics to helping with dealing with advanced topics.

FinOps Visibility Dashboard

Disclaimer: I work at Google in the cloud team. Opinions are my own and not the views of my current employer.

Update (#3) (10 June 2024): Several additional resources

Cloud FinOps is a framework that brings together people, process and technology promoting and driving financial awareness and accountability in the organization. It focuses on business value maximization rather than only cost optimization. The 5 minute video — What is FinOps and 3 reasons why you should care about it? — is a good introduction to the framework’s 5 building blocks making this possible:

  • Accountability & enablement
  • Measurement & realization
  • Cost optimization
  • Planning & forecasting
  • Tools & accelerators

Read more about each of these building blocks in the article Cloud FinOps: The Secret To Unlocking The Economic Potential Of Public Cloud and learn more from cost-optimization experts’ recommendations and common industry techniques.

The Google Cloud FinOps landing page introduces the FinOps value, key considerations and how to measure its impact. As organizations grow their cloud usage they need to remain connected to the investments they are making and the value it is generating. Metrics can help with this and need to be defined across the 5 building blocks. This article proposes 5 key metrics to get started and measure Cloud FinOps impact in your organization.

But adopting FinOps successfully in an organization cannot be limited to processes and controls; it depends heavily on enabling the right cultural change across many different stakeholders in the organization.

Whitepapers

Getting started with FinOps on GCP

A framework for Google Cloud Platform (GCP), covering the teams required, the processes and behaviors to embrace, the outcomes expected, and an approach to implement it

The Business Value of Improved Performance and Efficiency with Google Cloud Platform (IDC)

IDC: How Google Cloud helps SMEs accelerate business growth through increase productivity and scalability while achieving greeter cost efficiencies

Maximize business value with cloud FinOps

Start from the core building blocks of cloud FinOps and define key success metrics for business value realization

FinOps from the Field: Leveraging Cloud FinOps to measure the business value realized by your cloud transformation

This whitepaper aims to spotlight key insights that can be drawn from the data, highlighting how customers are generating measurable business value — also beyond cost savings — through their cloud transformation.

How to build financial resilience

Identify 3 foundational cloud pillars to help you accelerate time to value and become a more resilient company during an economic downturn: technology cost optimization, enhanced operational effectiveness & people-powered productivity and empowerment
Achieving cloud financial resilience with Cloud FinOps

Achieving cloud financial resilience with Cloud FinOps

From quick fixes to reduce your cloud spending to implementing effective cost governance, Google Clouds’ insights can help you develop your optimized, long-term cloud cost strategy.

Decoding Cloud FinOps to accelerate digital transformation

Digital transformation requires a programmatic approach through an incremental yet agile, cost-effective, value-driven, and sustainable strategy to drive successful transformation across the organization.

Getting started with FinOps on GCP

Implementing FinOps is not a one time activity but a continuous discipline and a journey that every organization should invest in as part of their cloud strategy. Getting started on the Cloud FinOps journey can be overwhelming and the following playbook may help to structure this for you. . Need help creating a concrete plan? A FinOps roadmap helps key stakeholders within a customer’s organization have the ability to answer the difficult question of “Where do we start?” Read more in this blog post.

Cloud FinOps Playbook

Making information visible

Informing the teams with accurate data improves this understanding and facilitates moving to the next phase: making them accountable for managing and improving their cloud spend. A good starting point is the introduction of cost visibility dashboards. A couple of best practices to keep in mind include:

  • Set up a billing export to BigQuery and create your data environment for easy analysis and visualization.
  • Diving deeper into granular cost trends made users switch from the billing console to BigQuery requiring to write manual SQL queries to replicate the info that is diplayed. A new feature (released in May 2024) now provides an equivalent SQL query for every cost report in the billing console to simplify these cost drill downs.
  • Augment billing data with labels and additional business related information for better reporting and advanced use cases in the future. Learn more about tagging and its benefits in the Driving Cloud FinOps at scale with Google Cloud Tagging whitepaper.
  • Automate landing zone services as much as possible, not only project setup but also assigning labels. This will enable you to maintain consistency for your reporting processes.

My blog post Growing your Google Cloud Landing zone with data explains how data can enrich a landing zone and the role it can play in a FinOps framework. I make the case for a modular metadata platform to provide transparent, accurate and actionable data to all stakeholders within an organization, starting small and growing in phases. This concept is illustrated with an example that starts from Infrastructure-as-Code and transitions into FinOps.

Making billing data visible
Cost insights dashboard

The next part is then to implement a strong governance and operating model fostering a cost-conscious, empowered and accountable culture. Instead of seeing cost as someone else’s responsibility, it is accepted as their own responsibility. A crucial capability achieving this is call chargeback: the process of mapping cloud consumption to internal consumers within your organization and facilitating recovery of cloud services costs. This blog post explains how this can be implemented by combining detailed billing data exported from Cloud Billing with organizational data.

Whitepapers

Unlocking the value of cloud FinOps with a new operating model

Establish strong financial governance and create a cost-conscious culture by adopting a new operating model.

A guide to financial governance in the cloud

The importance of financial governance controls and the role these controls play in increasing the predictability of cloud costs

Cloud FinOps — Shared Services Cost Allocation

Cloud FinOps point of view on cost allocation of shared cloud services

Unit costing: The next frontier in Cloud FinOps

This paper examines the nature of and the need for cloud unit costing and examples.

Driving cloud efficiency

In Google Cloud, several options are available to perform workload as well as pricing optimizations. As with most things in technology, the greatest standards are only as good as how well they are followed. The limiting factor, more often than not, isn’t the capability of the technology, but the people and processes involved. This blog post identifies the principles for lasting success looking at effectively right-sizing deployments, using various tools at your disposal and a framework assisting you with prioritizing choices.

Whitepaper

Understand the principles of cloud cost optimization

Five ways to reduce overall cloud spend with a cost optimization strategy

As a best practice it is important to realize that cost optimization is not an objective of its own. Increasing spend accompanied by increasing business value will be positive; while increasing spend without business value raises concerns. Yet, even in positive cases, it remains important to find the best solution and associated cost to generate business value. Cloud offers many options to design and implement solutions, so are you making use of the most appropriate one? Is the selected architecture efficient? Have you optimized on the default settings? Are you not making use of options that are nice but not essential? But remember to also include the effort required for performing optimizations — it requires cost to reduce cost.

Cost optimization matrix

One of the 5 building blocks listed above is planning & forecasting. This is an important topic since it allows to track planned spend against actual spend, account for both steady state as well as new workloads and identify concerns when deviations occur. And generally, planning and tracking costs will be cheaper than fixing cost concerns.

To control cloud spend tools such as budgets, alerts and quotas can be used. A budget enables you to control the total cost by workload while the alert helps to keep track of the actuals. In this way, you can use budgets to automate cost controls:

Quotas provide protection against cost overrun, and can be indicators of bad code. They protect the community of Google Cloud users by preventing unforeseen spikes in usage and overloaded services. But, they also help you manage resources. For example, you can set your own limits on service usage while developing and testing your applications to avoid unexpected bills from using expensive resources. Now, if you are looking for an automated way to manage quotas over a large number of projects, you can have a look at the Quota Monitoring Solution. This provides an easy and centralized way to view and monitor the quota usage in a central dashboard and to use default alerting capabilities across all quotas.

Each product has its own cost management best practices for which you can find more information in the documentation, in blog posts or videos. If you want to learn more about designing a cost-optimized foundation, you can start on the Cost optimization on Google Cloud for developers and operators page and explore the following:

Diving more into detail, you can find an overview hereunder of several useful resources.

General

Cloud billing

Whitepaper

Maximize Cost Efficiency with CUD Optimization Strategy

By incorporating best practices and committing to use key sets of Google Cloud services, organizations can save up to 70% on certain cloud costs.

Compute resource optimizations

GKE resource optimizations

Storage resource optimizations

BigQuery resource optimizations

Generative AI

Other resource optimizations

Embedding FinOps and driving self-sufficiency

Google Cloud provides a number of training and certification programs that can help organizations get the most out of FinOps:

It is important to highlight that this does not replace overall training and certification. From the start it is crucial to invest in skill development and continuous learning. This helps people to realize how decisions and actions influence costs and what actions can be taken to increase efficiency and effectiveness.

Creating internal communities to share experiences and best practices facilitates and enhances these learning experiences. Getting involved in external communities and learning from other organizations provides the additional benefits of having an inside-out view and may provide insights and inspiration for new initiatives:

And last but not least, stay up to date with the Cost Management blog.

Closing thoughts

It is important to realize that implementing with Cloud FinOps is not a one-time activity and that there is also not one single path to take. At every point along the way, you will need to reflect, fine-tune your approach and make decisions on how to continue your journey. Therefore, it is important to aim for progression rather than perfection: start small and continuously improve, but it is important to establish the necessary foundations early. The following themes can help you to define your strategy and decisions:

  • Establish financial governance: Provide better cloud cost governance and controls to prevent cloud sprawl
  • Provide cost transparency: Enable cloud cost visibility through persona-based reporting dashboards
  • Improve forecasting accuracy: Shift from trend-based forecasting to driver-based forecasting models
  • Optimize cloud spend: Embed continuous cost optimization with automation capabilities
  • Accelerate business value: Align business objectives and digital strategies to drive cloud ROI
  • Drive cost-conscious culture: Focus on enabling financial accountability across the organization by building a Cloud FinOps function
Google Cloud Platform
Finops
Cloud Culture
Infrastructure

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Peter Billen
Google Cloud - Community

Written by Peter Billen

81 Followers
Writer for

Peter is a Principal Architect at Google Cloud. He is helping companies get the most out of their digital transformation while moving to the cloud.

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