Principles of FinOps

The FinOps Foundation has produced a set of principles to support practitioners in adopting the FinOps Culture. These are really useful ideas that can be used when starting FinOps practice.

For this post I am going to go over the 6 principles with a little bit of info on how I have used them at my company.

1. A Centralised team that drives FinOps

Now, it totally depends on your business and whether you can have a fully dedicated FinOps team or not, and both are totally fine. What I take from this principle is that whatever the size of your business, someone must take responsibility for FinOps work at a company, even if it is just a part of their job.

Key areas they should focus on are:

• Having an overall view of the estate

• Being a knowledge-base

• Providing advice

• Automating cost management

2. Business Value of Cloud Drives Decisions

Now I think this is worded a bit weirdly but what I take this to mean is that one of the key reasons we move to the Cloud is to lower costs and have the ability to have more flexibility with what we need. Therefore, as FinOps practitioners, we need to make sure that the Cloud is still financially viable. This means taking a more critical look at what is costing you money and assess whether it is needed. Some examples here.

3. Everyone Takes Ownership of their Cloud

This is a simple yet effective principle. If you don’t know who owns something, how do you know who is going to pay for it? Does it need to stay on all the time or does it even need to be there in the first place.

A key way of checking this information is by tagging accounts and resources in accounts or having a third set of data to identify relationships.

4. FinOps Reports should be accessible and timely

Once you know who owns what and how much you are spending you can tell everyone!! Well not everyone, but all the important people. Dev's, Finance and Business owners are all likely to want to know about costs, and if they don’t they should.

Some simple reporting points are:

• Different people will want different information and its key to ask what they want

• Having fast feedback loops to stay on top of costs

• Visibility is key for data as this allows people to question their own costs

• You should avoid manual downloads of excel sheets at all costs

5. Take Advantage of variable cost models of the Cloud

Use what the Cloud was built for! You know the drill, these things are great ways to take advantage of the Cloud and its flexibility:

• Reserved Instances

• Utilisation of services

• Scheduling usage

• Instance Types (too big/ too small)

• Cloud Provider help

• Cheaper options

6. Teams Need to Collaborate

Finally, and possibly the most important, is going back to one of the key ideas of FinOps which is bringing together Dev's, Finance and Business owners to get them to all speak the same language and get the best results. A big part of this is sharing knowledge, challenges and goals so that they can all align and move forward.

So, that was a quick look over the FinOps Principles from the foundation. More can be found out here https://www.finops.org/

Happy Saving :)