FinOps: Simple Steps to a Lean Cloud to Save Money

Mastering FinOps is essential as cloud spend has its own challenges.

To better understand the situation let’s consider these statistics from Statista:

1. Cloud Spending Is Skyrocketing

• Stat: The global public cloud services market is expected to grow by approximately 20.4% in 2024, reaching about $675 billion .

• Challenge: With cloud spending growing at this pace, organisations often struggle to control costs as their cloud footprint expands. This rapid growth can lead to untracked expenses, resource sprawl, and difficulty maintaining visibility into cloud usage.

• FinOps Insight: Implement robust tagging and real-time dashboards to track and manage this explosive growth effectively.

2. SaaS Dominates Cloud Usage

• Stat: SaaS represented the largest segment of the global cloud computing market in 2022, with revenues of $185 billion .

• Challenge: SaaS applications often operate independently across departments, creating decentralised spending. This decentralisation makes it challenging to gain an enterprise-wide view of cloud costs.

• FinOps Insight: Introduce cost attribution practices like tagging SaaS applications by team or function and consolidate billing across the organisation for better financial control.

3. Rising Public Cloud Revenue Highlights Overspending Risks

• Stat: Public cloud market revenue is projected to increase significantly from 2020 to 2029 .

• Challenge: As organisations adopt more public cloud services, they face challenges with over-provisioning, idle resources, and unpredictable pricing models.

• FinOps Insight: Use Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, and automated cost monitoring tools like AWS Budgets and Cost Explorer to mitigate overspending risks.

Let’s go deeper.

What are the statistics telling us?

These statistics underscore the critical need for FinOps as organisations increasingly rely on cloud services. The rapid growth of the cloud market and the decentralised nature of SaaS deployments highlight the importance of visibility, accountability, and optimisation in cloud financial management.

You Should Care About FinOps.

Without realising, it is like businesses leaving a faucet running without knowing how much the water bill will cost.That’s how cloud spending feels without FinOps.

FinOps ensures every spend in the cloud is aligned with business value, and it’s a cultural shift where finance, tech, and operations teams collaborate to maximise ROI and drive informed decision-making.

Let’s define FinOps.

What Is FinOps?

At its core, FinOps relates to cloud spending, it is about creating visibility, accountability, and optimisation in cloud.

How will FinOps in practice work?

Think of it as a balancing act between cost, speed, and quality.

• Visibility: Gain real-time insights into who’s spending what.

• Accountability: Empower teams to take ownership of their budgets.

• Optimisation: Drive cost efficiency through strategic decisions.

The ultimate goal? To turn cloud expenses into measurable business value.

1. The Three Core Phases of FinOps

Inform Phase: Understand Your Cloud Spend

Use tools like AWS Cost Explorer to analyse costs. Implement tagging strategies (e.g., Team: DevOps, Project: Alpha) for cost attribution. Share transparent reports with stakeholders to foster trust.

Optimise Phase: Trim the Fat

Right-size workloads—why pay for unused capacity? Identify and eliminate abandoned or idle resources (like VMs or storage volumes). Use Reserved Instances or Savings Plans for long-term discounts.

Operate Phase: Build a Continuous Improvement Culture

Schedule regular cost reviews with your teams. Set automated alerts for budget breaches using tools like AWS Budgets. Encourage collaboration between engineering and finance teams.

2. Actionable FinOps Practices

These steps will set your organisation up for success:

Tagging Is King: Use metadata (e.g., Environment: Staging) to track costs.Budgets and Forecasts: Don’t just monitor—predict your future spending using historical data.

Real-Time Monitoring: Dashboards like AWS QuickSight make cost insights digestible.

Commitment Discounts: Secure savings with multi-year Reserved Instances or Savings Plans.

Team Accountability: Make every team responsible for their cloud costs, empowering ownership.

Overcoming Common FinOps Challenges

Here’s how to tackle common roadblocks:

1. Decentralised Spending

Standardise cost governance. Use tagging and budgets to track usage by team or department.

2. Lack of Visibility

• Deploy dashboards that provide real-time insights into spending patterns.

3. Cultural Pushback

• Position cost optimisation as a way to enable innovation rather than restrict it.

FinOps Tools You’ll Love

These tools aren’t just helpful—they’re essential:

• AWS Cost Explorer: Visualise and analyse your AWS spending.

Looking Ahead

FinOps in Action: The Future of Collaborative Cost Management

The future of FinOps is exciting. Trends like AI-driven cost analysis, automated optimisation, and DevOps integration are reshaping the landscape. Imagine your CI/CD pipeline automatically flagging expensive configurations and recommending cheaper alternatives before deployment.

FinOps is about setting the stage for continuous improvement and scalability in your cloud strategy.

Final Thoughts: FinOps Is Your Cloud GPS

Unchecked cloud costs can spiral out of control so think about How your organisation handle FinOps challenges? Have you implemented any of these practices?

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