Cost Challenges in Large Business
Large infrastructure: Large organizations have large on-demand infrastructures to run their multiple businesses. This leads to blowing up the cloud budgets without any certain clues.
Large teams: When working with very large teams where engineers are continuously bringing up resources to expand businesses but don’t have visibility of their cost spending.
No Accountability between teams: Lack of accountability in large teams & no ownership. Due to this, there is no visibility on cloud cost allocations.
Decentralized communication & No planning. Lack of planning & communication between finance, IT teams & business team. Teams should share the same language & processes so they can manage cloud spending while maintaining business continuity.
FinOps to the Rescue
FinOps is not a technology or Tool. FinOps is a cultural practice for managing cloud costs where engineering, finance, technology, and business teams collaborate & take ownership of their cloud usage supported by a central best-practices group
Bringing the FinOps culture into an organization enables it to get maximum business value, minimize cost & at the same time gain visibility and control over spending without compromising delivery velocity.
This way businesses can increase the usage of the cloud & minimize their bills.
FinOps: Principles & Practices
Principles:
Teams need to collaborate
- This means engineering, finance, technology, and business teams should collaborate & break the silos between teams. This helps all to plan to cloud spending. Cost should be considered as a new efficiency metric. Define governance & control for cloud usage.
- Everyone takes ownership of their cloud usage
- Enable accountability between teams to manage their own cloud usage against the budget & gain full visibility at all levels.
A centralized team drives FinOps
- Centralized FinOps practitioner who brings best practices & bridges all teams by enabling evidence-based decisions in new real-time to help optimize cloud cost & increase business value.
- Reports should be accessible and timely
- Continuous feedback & tracking to increase the visibility of cloud cost to determine under or over-provisioned resources.
- Cost analysis to determine & understand why costs increased. Benchmarking in teams & industry to determine performance.
Practices:
- Understanding cloud usage & cost
- Performance tracking & benchmarking
- Real-Time decision making
- Cloud rate optimization
- Cloud Usage optimization
- Organizational alignment
- Cloud Cost Management & Analysis
- Planning & budgeting for business & technical needs.
- Enable collaboration & Accountability in all teams
- Rate Optimization & setup cost visibility
- Set up timely reports & measurements of cost at each level.
- Forecasting the cloud cost.
- Realize the spending & drive decisions
- Resource Optimization
- Tooling & accelerate the management.
Core components for cost management & analysis
- Accountability and enablement
- Measurement and realization
- Cost optimization
- Planning and forecasting
- Tools and accelerators
FinOps Tools on the globe
- Harness
- Viratana
- Kubecost
- Infracost
- Cast-AI
- Finout
- Spot by Netapp
