Maximising Operational Efficiency: Transforming Cost Curiosity into a Stronger Optimisation Appetite

Cloud FinOps teams have a healthy obsession focus on cost optimisation. With a constant effort to interpret invoices, identify trends, and analyse cloud bills as though they were history books, they have cultivated a heightened awareness of cloud costs.

Promoting a Culture of Cost Consciousness

This awareness could be infectious, generating a shared curiosity across different teams. Like the curiosity in children, this appetite for knowledge can inspire teams in the discovery of their insights.

Operating in a state of cost ignorance can prevent businesses from uncovering cost-saving opportunities and hinder their ability to make informed decisions about spending. By actively monitoring spending and resource utilisation, businesses can identify bottlenecks, reduce IT infrastructure complexity, and optimise cloud usage, ultimately leading to greater overall operational efficiency.

The FinOps team has the potential to transform mere awareness of costs into an

"appetite for cost optimisation". By elevating this appetite, it can guide the

organisation towards a better understanding of unit costs, and optimisation of resource utilisation.

Streamlining Financial Processes through Automation

The amount of information that the FinOps team handles to understand cloud costs is infinite in comparison to traditional technology, both in volume and speed. Greater knowledge within the FinOps Practitioners and a wider range of solutions available, selecting the appropriate tools can be challenging.

While using the principle of proportionality aids in making informed decisions and progressing in knowledge, automation is a crucial objective to optimise both the time and quality of decisions.

How to shift the perspective of FinOps to demonstrate the full value?

While the FinOps team is well-known for its expertise in providing financial guidance during moments such as design, deployments, and forecasting, some may perceive the function as more focused on being the "finance police".

This is the period I used to defined as ” FinOps by Hammer”, forcing the optimisation from policies and rules, as a new governance question part of Corporate Politics. The opposite scenario is The Frugal Architecture presented by Werner Vogel’s at AWS Re:Invent 2023 in Las Vegas.

The key to achieving effective Cost Optimisation in Cloud lies not only in reducing expenses, but also in optimising resource utilisation to ensure maximum efficiency across all levels, from initial design and planning, through implementation, and beyond. Link the Product Value with a sense of Domestic Economy inside the full Product and Engineering Team.

Note: "Appetite for Optimisation " came to my mind while listening to Guns'n Roses "Appetite for Destruction”, from 1987. The first idea is to generate in others the appetite for cost optimisation and spread through them the best cloud optimisation practices. But also, the ambition to extend this appetite for value throughout the organisation.