At the Cloud Economic Summit in San Francisco, a consortium called the FinOps Foundation was announced to share best practices for managing the cost of cloud computing.
The stated mission of the FinOps Foundation (F2) is to deliver real-world stories, expertise, and inspiration for and by FinOps leaders and practitioners—all aimed at helping the community members and their teams become better at cloud financial management.
Created by Atlassian, Autodesk, Cloudability, Gannett, HERE Technologies, Just Eat, Nationwide, and Spotify, the FinOps Foundation is a non-profit organization focused on codifying and promoting cloud financial management best practices and standards. F2 is an open membership community consisting of IT, finance, and business practitioners and executives. The foundation provides resources, including a community website dedicated to sharing best practices, access to FinOps meetup groups, training workshops, learning materials, and events.
“Over the years, I’ve worked with the top cloud spenders in the world as they paved the way and created a model for good cloud financial management that others can now follow with FinOps,” said J.R. Storment, co-founder of Cloudability and president of the FinOps Foundation. “The FinOps Foundation is a community where practitioners and executives alike on both sides of the aisle—finance and tech—can collaborate on practical everyday challenges to plan for the future of their cloud journey.”
According to the foundation, cloud spending is now a material amount of total IT spend. Gartner has stated the 5-year CAGR for the public cloud services market through 2022 is forecast at 16.6%, hitting $360.2 billion by 2022. Yet, with all this growth, the cloud operating model is immature. As companies move away from the data center and its fixed cost model and move to variable, consumption-based spending in the cloud, they must transform their financial operating model.
The FinOps operating model—a combination of systems, best practices, and culture—aims to bring financial accountability to the variable spend model of cloud, enabling distributed teams to make business trade-offs between speed, cost, and quality. Distributed decision making, coupled with the move to variable spending in cloud, means that technology teams now must partner with finance and business teams to make informed decisions that drive continual optimization.
FinOps processes, the foundation says, will enable these teams to operate at high velocity while improving the unit economics of cloud.
For more information or to join, go to www.finops.org.