Path to successful cloud FinOps
Today everyone knows successful cloud transition for large organizations needs cultural shifts. Most organizations have centralized IT infrastructure teams which were relevant when the organization had all IT assets housed in few locations. These centralized IT teams can bring invaluable knowledge and practices but if they fail to adapt or use the cloud as a catalyst for tight-grain controls they become blockers to adoption, innovation, and migration. In the process, they lose track of critical central functions like FinOps.
How many times did we wake up to huge cloud bills …let see how to create a practice around managing the cost and creating the best ROI on the cloud investments.
FinOps is a relatively new term out there in Cloud governance. I see it as a branch of cloud governance that looks at financial accountability and management of IT resources on the cloud.
Here are the various phases of FinOps that the cloud governance team should be responsible for
- Plan
- Optimize
- Observe
- Automate
This model can be used as a backbone for continuous improvement of cloud housed infrastructure coupled with people, processes, and tools to enable this model.
A picture is worth a thousand words … here is the model in a single frame capturing high-level objectives for each phase.
For a multi-cloud finops model, there are additional considerations and complexities to be factored in.
- Governance principles for selecting the right provider for the right use case.
- Effective use of free tier capabilities across providers.
- Capability to aggregate the billing data and analysis across service provides and automating the analysis.
- Spreading the workload between on-premise Infrastructure and Cloud for effective cost management.
Putting it all together.
The tool provided is not an exhaustive list but a listing of some of the best tools available in no particular order. I hope this will give the audience a quick overview of how to set up a finops team and what to expect from them.
