Top 3 Tips for Adopting FinOps
With the growth in cloud adoption comes the inevitable growth in associated consumption costs — this can sometimes be a cost that either goes unnoticed until the bill arrives or is so complex and dynamic, the challenge feels insurmountable.
As quoted by the FinOps Foundation in their State of FinOps Report 2021 report, ‘The higher the spend, the greater the need.’
What is FinOps?
FinOps is a cross functional practice of technical, commercial, and financial resource that aims to reduce unnecessary cloud spend, forecast cloud cost more accurately, take advantage of better pricing through reserving resources in advance and accurately cross-charging and allocating costs internally.
So, you have recognised that you need to control cloud costs, but where do you start? My blog post will highlight 3 key areas to help you kick start your FinOps practice and optimise your cloud costs.
Top 3 FinOps Tips
1. Create Your Team
Finding one or two individuals within your business with a vested interest in cloud and optimising cost would be a sensible place to start. These individuals will be key to your FinOps process creation and will need to help you drive your FinOps adoption across the business to extract best value, so they need to be fully committed to the cause. The ideal scenario longer term, would be to have stakeholders from IT, DevOps, Procurement, Finance, Operations, Cloud/Centre of Cloud Excellence and Office of CIO. This will ensure that you have full coverage and representation from across the business and consider the aims, objectives, and processes of each of these areas when you create your FinOps procedures.
2. Initial Analysis
The next step would be to understand where the current cloud costs are being spent.
Having an internal amnesty where departments across the business essentially ‘surrender’ or volunteer potentially unknown cloud costs could be a useful (and insightful!) exercise. Collate these costs and work out what your cloud cost landscape across the business looks like, then cherry pick some of the low hanging fruit to see if costs can be reduced. Your technical experts and engineers should be able to suggest rapid optimisation techniques that reap immediate cost benefit.
3. Report on Successes
From your initial cost optimisation or reduction activity, report on these successes internally, showing where costs were being spent, how quickly optimisation techniques could be applied, and the savings enjoyed as a result. You are likely to get more attention and buy-in from key individuals and the business in general, where positive results are reported.
Once you have carried out these initial steps, your great work will start to gain momentum and create more cost savings! Your FinOps team will then need to consider how to proactively maintain this position and create ongoing business processes to ensure that a return to cloud waste or overspend does not reoccur.
There may well be other objectives to fulfil such as cross charging and how tagging needs to be implemented, and eventually forecasting cloud usage in order to reserve instances as opposed to buying last minute which can be more expensive.
A much more detailed discussion of FinOps can be obtained from our recently published whitepaper that discusses the practice of FinOps, what this is, why it is important, what benefits can be reaped and where to start if this practice is not already part of your business process.
For more information on our FinOps approach, take a look at our website, watch our short video or contact us.
About The Author:
Jason Pepper is the Head of SAM Practice here at Version 1.
