FinOps is a set of practices, principles, and tools to optimize cloud spending by aligning IT, finance, and business teams. The term “FinOps” is short for Financial Operations.
It involves the collaboration between these departments to help reduce costs, improve the efficiency of cloud spending, and achieve better financial visibility into cloud usage.
Examples of FinOps practices include:
- Cost allocation: identifying and allocating cloud costs to different teams or projects, ensuring accountability and transparency.
- Usage analysis: monitoring cloud usage to identify inefficiencies and opportunities to optimize costs.
- Reserved instances: pre-purchasing cloud resources to achieve cost savings over time.
- Rightsizing: adjusting cloud resource capacity to match actual usage, reducing waste.
The risks associated with not implementing FinOps practices can include:
- Overspending on cloud resources, leading to budget overruns.
- Lack of visibility into cloud usage, making it challenging to identify areas for cost optimization.
- Inefficient cloud resource utilization, resulting in unnecessary costs.
Several resources are available to learn more about FinOps, including online courses, webinars, and communities.
FinOps Foundation is a non-profit organization that provides training, certification, and best practices for FinOps practitioners.
Cloud providers such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure also offer resources and tools to help organizations optimize their cloud spending through FinOps practices. Additionally, financial and IT publications such as Forbes and InformationWeek often cover FinOps and its impact on cloud spending.
