FinOps on Clubhouse

Description

FinOps is shorthand for Cloud Financial Management. It is the practice of bringing financial accountability to the variable spend model of cloud, enabling distributed teams to make business trade-offs between speed, cost, and quality.



At its core, FinOps is a cultural practice. It’s the most efficient way in the world for teams to manage their cloud costs, where everyone takes ownership of their cloud usage supported by a central best-practices group. Cross-functional teams work together to enable faster delivery, while at the same time gaining more financial and operational control.

No longer is a siloed procurement team identifying costs and signing off on them. Instead, a cross-functional FinOps team adopts a definitive series of procurement best practices, enabling them to pull together technology, business, and finance in order to optimize cloud vendor management, rate, and discounting. With FinOps, each operational team (workload, service, product owner) can access the near-real-time data they need to influence their spend and help them make intelligent decisions that ultimately result in efficient cloud costs balanced against the speed/performance and quality/availability of services.

If it seems that FinOps is about saving money, then think again. FinOps is about making money. Cloud spend can drive more revenue, signal customer base growth, enable more product and feature release velocity, or even help shut down a data center. FinOps is all about removing blockers; empowering engineering teams to deliver better features, apps, and migrations faster; and enabling a cross-functional conversation about where to invest and when. Sometimes a business will decide to tighten the belt; sometimes it’ll decide to invest more. But now teams know why they’re making those decisions.