FinOps Engineering — Elevating Cost as a NFR
FinOps Engineering — Elevating Cost as a NFR.
FinOps is a framework and cultural practise that helps organisations successfully adapt to the consumption models of Cloud and SaaS which differ from tradition.
When teams build software they know they need to balance different concerns as they seek to ship their desired function. They need a nice user experience. They need to build in a way that can be maintained and extended in the future. They need to take extra care around reliability and security etc.
Cost has always been crucially important in the technology side of organisations but the big decisions have been made more centrally. Generally engineers know to try to implement software efficiently so it will perform well and make good use of resources but other than that the cost has been abstracted away as workloads are deployed to pre-existing infrastructure that the organisation already owns (CapEx).
In this new world product teams make direct decisions around the services they use and how they use them. And the menu is not at all simple with IaaS, PaaS and SaaS in thousands of different flavours and the prices in hieroglyphics.
It requires a bit of a mindset shift. New problems are presented. New controls, new solutions, new knowledge is needed.
This model upgrades the importance of cost optimisation as a non-functional requirement to be considered at the team-level like never before.
To succeed in this environment organisations need to be proactive. They need to invest in to understanding this landscape, show they value cost-conscious decision-making and find ways to incentivise the right behaviours.
FinOps as a concept, FinOps.org and the surrounding community and movement help along this journey.
