Cloud Financial Management — Beyond Just Optimization

As spending on the public cloud is increasing globally, companies are looking for ways to reduce cost and increase efficiency. Financial Operations, or FinOps, is similar to DevOps, which enables companies to accelerate technology delivery. FinOps is a new operating model that maximizes the value of an organization's cloud investment.

In this lesson, you are going to learn about FinOps Principles and how to build FinOps Teams, as well as the three phases of the FinOps Lifecycle. Specifically, you will learn how to apply FinOps processes and practices to reduce rates and avoid unnecessary cloud costs.

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Learning Objectives

• Understand what makes the cloud so powerful and why it is changing how businesses operate
• Understand what makes cloud challenging from a technology, management, and financial perspective
• Learn about the six FinOps Principles and how to build successful FinOps Teams
• Learn about FinOps capabilities and how to build a common language within your organization
• Learn about the anatomy of a cloud bill and how to take advantage of the Basic Cloud Equation
• Learn about the three phases of the FinOps Lifecycle and how to build successful processes and practices to reduce rates and avoid cost

Intended Audience

This lesson is for engineers, operations, and Finance people looking to understand how to improve efficiency and reduce cost in the cloud.

Prerequisites

to get the most out of this lesson,  you should have a foundational understanding of cloud concepts, specifically how compute and storage are provisioned and billed in the cloud. Some familiarity with rate reduction and cost avoidance methods in the cloud would also be helpful but are not essential.

References

The FinOps Lifecycle section of this lesson references materials from:

• FinOps Framework by FinOps Foundation

The Anatomy of a Cloud Bill lecture references materials from:

• Cloud FinOps: Collaborative, Real-Time Cloud Financial Management, O'Reilly Media; 1st edition (January 7, 2020)