My FinOps X Recap

A few weeks on from a fantastic trip to San Diego, for which I feel very privileged to have been given the opportunity by Eviden to go on, I reflect back on just how great FinOps X was.? Both in terms of how well the event was run, how great the atmosphere and sense of community was, but also that even with 6 or 7 years in FinOps I still learned some brilliant things.? To such an extent some things made me really evaluate what I thought I knew, and whether in some aspects I’d been wrong all along (special thanks to Alee Whitman for this one).

So where do I start in my reflections? Well first it was great to see some old friends and also meet up with some people who I have virtually met while doing the podcast (link).? What surprised me more though, was how easy it was to meet other people and instantly make some great connections.? It showed me the difference between in person and virtual meetings, which we’ve all gotten so used to.? On some of the online summits, I feel a bit reluctant to speak (which will surprise those who know me well) while in person I seemed far more willing to chat to anyone!? Some of this was that I could tell people were open to any ideas and chatting to people.? It felt more like being on the slack channels, which I find really open and have a great communal feel.? So thanks to everyone who helped create that atmosphere.

A great example of this was the chalk talk I went to, if I get to go next time I’ll definitely go to more, which was on the Social Aspects of FinOps, run by a friend of mine TJ (one of my FinOps heroes) who works at Box.? We split into groups to talk about some of the aspects of the subject and the openness and the desire to let everyone speak in my group was really heart warming, and gave us all a great chance to share and learn in equal measure.? More than that though, when the groups went back to share with the entire room, there was an equally warm reception.? So thank you everyone involved in that chalk talk, I really enjoyed it.

Another thing that stood out to me in meeting so many fantastic people, is there is an increasing diversity in the types of people (in terms of personas) that are moving into FinOps and seeing it as a big enough part of their world to join an event like this.? It was a real mix of technical, financial, product and business people all coming together to understand that if cloud is important to their business, so is FinOps.? What will be really interesting, is to see if over the coming years people realise they can take FinOps learnings into many of the variable costs in their business and learn to make better decisions because of them.

A topic that’s really important to myself is Sustainability/GreenOps, we talk about it a bit on the podcast but it’s certainly something we want to talk more about and we’re trying to work out how best to do that due to the lack of cloud related news on the topic.? I took the chance to join as many of the sustainability talks as I could and catch up with people like Mark Richter at Thoughtworks who is both an old friend and also a very knowledgeable person on practical GreenOps having implemented Cloud Carbon Footprint (the open source tool founded by Thoughtworks (Link)) at the business.? This is something I’m working on in my own role, and it was great to hear his war stories on the subject.? If you don’t know him, I definitely suggest reaching out and seeing if he can help bring his value to your business too.

Going back to the talks on sustainability, my favourite one was by Fidelity, where Paul Guarino gave a really down to earth story about what their goals are and how they were working towards them.? There wasn’t any bravado about how well they were doing, it was warts and all honesty about the challenges and how they were making progress at a desirable rate, but not running before they could walk.? They were also using the Cloud Carbon Footprint tool so it was great to go ask someone else how it was working too!? It made me realise, we don’t need to have all of the answers today for sustainability (as much as we’d like them) but we need to start working on them now.? We can’t trust the numbers from the vendors, we certainly can’t compare them, so find a way to give yourself a baseline to start seeing whether your position is improving.? It’s the least we can do… in fact, it’s the least we must do.

The next topic I learned about was FOCUS, I’d heart about it before, and spoke to Rob Martin about it on the Tuesday, but I was really pleased to get to go to the session where it was discussed in depth and I’m really hopeful I can bring my organisation into the effort so we can bring my team’s knowledge in to support this great vision and work.? But what am I rambling on about? What is FOCUS?? Well let me tell you (or rather let me tell you what Mike Fuller and Udam Dewaja told me!? FOCUS stands for FinOps Open Cost & Usage Specification, it’s an attempt for the community (and hopefully vendors) to come together to create an open standard for cloud cost and usage data.??

For anyone who works with cloud usage/billing data, you know it’s very complex, for those of us lucky enough to work with all three major hyperscalers, we know it’s extremely complex and totally different from vendor to vendor.? If I didn’t have my wonderful team, I’d be lost for all of the complexities in this space.? I’ve been very lucky to now work with two organisations who have brilliant billing people who truly understand this data, but most people don’t have these people to support their business and for them this open standard could be a game changer.? I recommend you go and look at the site (focus.finops.org) and see how you can contribute!

Having talked previously about some tooling for sustainability (or specifically a tool while other wonderful single cloud tools like Green Pixie also exist), it’s probably worth next talking a little about the tooling landscape and what I learned about it there.? In my job I’ve had the opportunity to do a huge amount of research on various tools on the market and comparing them and also getting to know some of those businesses, and I constantly get approached by more and more tooling providers to look at them as well.? However, there were still a few tools on show (or with people present) that I didn’t really know.? It was interesting getting tooling providers introducing me to other providers who do something different they don’t do, which I think shows again the community that was in place.? However, on the whole I’d say the market is getting more densely populated by tools that are struggling to really show their differentiation.? Those tools trying to be good at all things (except maybe the odd exception) are actually falling behind on most areas to people who are specialising.? This shouldn’t be a surprise, and further backs up my previous assumptions that it’s a suite of tools that really empowers an organisation, rather than a single all powerful one.

One of the great companies, who I had spoken to on slack before but never met, were Infracost and they were introduced to me by my friend Tom Cross.? These guys build the prius effect (visualising efficiency) into Infrastructure as Code (IaC), which based on my background I find really interesting.? People need to move where possible to a mode two model to get the most out of the cloud but this can suddenly come into conflict with some tools.? As Tom Cross and I spoke about at length over a beer, automated FinOps tooling causes drift when using IaC and therefore causes more problems than it solves.? What we need is tooling that actually works out the required optimisation, creates the templates (terraform for example) and puts them to a PR for someone to approve to deploy.? This automates the process, removes drift and creates a real option for mode two organisations.? Let’s see which clever set of people go off and do this!

I also got to have a huge amount of fun doing a podcast with two of my FinOps heroes, Marit Hughes and Stephanie Gooch.? Two absolute powerhouses of the game and brilliant people to spend time with.? Steph has had an interesting conversation come out of a chalk talk, “Where does FinOps start”, a hugely open topic that we attempted to handle on the podcast, and the openness of the question led to all sorts of different answers, around when in the migration and when in the training process do you start FinOps. It’s one of the craziest episodes we’ve ever done and the first in person ever. So that was a great deal of fun and I learned a lot about how to look at where we should be starting FinOps. In both cases, early!

Continuing on from learning from these two brilliant women in FinOps, it’s worth again focussing on what I learned but more from listening to talks and actually my top three talks were all led by women and all gave me a lot to think about and things I could take away and put into my own practice to improve what I/we do.

The first was Natalie Daly from HSBC on who followed J.R. on the first keynote.? For anyone who hasn’t heard of Natalie, she’s one of the real rockstars of FinOps, HSBC is miles ahead of most organisations and a huge amount of that comes from her knowledge and vision.? I was really lucky in that I also got to meet her in person and she’s not putting on a persona on stage, she’s just absolutely brilliant!? So what did Natalie have to say, well she showed the different tasks/capabilities that HSBC has and where they fit on the Crawl, Walk, Run scale.? She then talked about the fact that this doesn’t stand still.? Basically, if you’re running, you can’t stop or you’ll quickly fall behind and no longer be a “runner”.? That’s how quickly the world of FInOps is evolving and I think it’s a great metaphor.? You can’t just stop and think you’ve won FinOps, it’s a continuous practice that needs to be consistently reviewed and improved to keep bringing more value to the business.

The next talk that really stood out to me was from Nationwide, Julia Harvery and Audrea Ratliff shared their incredible system they developed with Joe Daly called COIN scores. Cost Optimization Index.? It’s a score, with associated traffic light colours, that Nationwide applies to all of their workloads using spend vs low hanging fruit optimisations, to see how hygienic their environments are.? They then visualise this and share this to all the leaders.? It makes it easy to see where things are improving (or worsening) and where to spend more time with application teams to help drive improvements.? This really enables a centralised team to know where to spend their time to be the most effective.? I think it’s absolutely brilliant in its simplicity and wish I’d have been smart enough to come up with it!

The final talk I went to see was by no means the least.? Presented by Alee Whitman, one of the nicest and most brilliant people I met across the event, the topic was “Is it a Savings or a Spend Reduction?” I can’t lie, the topic intrigued me and seemingly a lot of other people as for a talk in one of the last slots, it was rammed.? I honestly think every one of those people will be pleased they went, it was brilliant.? The concept was really simple, but was something I’ve never really thought of before, especially because of how much the terminology is used in the market, where tooling providers and vendors (think Savings Plans) are all offering you savings.? Well according to Alee (and now me) they are wrong, they are offering your spend reductions which may then become savings.? So why are these two different? Well we’ve got to put our finance hates on.? A spend reduction, is only a saving, when it means the company has saved money vs its budget.? Let’s put that into practice, if someone has a budget of $100 per month, but they are spending $150, they put a Savings Plan or a tool in place and reduce that to $120, they haven’t actually made a saving, they are still overspending by $20 a month versus the budget.? However they have made a spend reduction.? This isn’t saying spend reductions aren’t valuable, they are but what we really need to focus on, is creating savings and this all comes down to budgeting.? Budgets are king in finance, and in cloud we see them as difficult (because of the variable nature) and this is why in FinOps all departments need to come together to really make meaningful and workable budgets that will allow us to better understand the value cloud is bringing.

So thank you to all of those wonderful people who taught me so much, to the organisers who worked so hard to make it a great event and the people who made it so welcoming, and finally thank you for reading because it’s far, far too long!