So, you are here because you are considering taking the FinOps Certified Practitioner exam.
I am quite new to the FinOps thing, but the more I read into it the more I find it interesting.
The key concepts I like to keep in mind:
There are currently six components of the FinOps Framework:
• Principles – drive our FinOps practices
• Personas – stakeholders that FinOps supports
• Domains – fundamental business outcomes
• Capabilities – activities performed to achieve desired outcomes (Domains) of FinOps
• Phases – iterative process model for exercising FinOps Capabilities
• Maturity Model – incremental assessment criteria for understanding the state of any FinOps activity or overall practice
Now let’s break each of them down into a bit more detail:
FinOps Principles:
- Teams Need to Collaborate: Effective cloud financial management requires collaboration across engineering, finance, and operations teams. Breaking down silos allows for better communication and shared responsibility for cloud spending.
- Everyone Takes Ownership of Cloud Usage: Cloud cost accountability should be spread across the organization, with every team understanding their role in managing their usage and costs.
- A Centralized Team Drives FinOps: A centralized FinOps team helps implement best practices, provides cloud cost transparency, and ensures everyone adheres to the organization’s financial goals.
- Business Value drives decisions: Cloud spending decisions should be based on business value rather than just cost, ensuring that cloud investments align with organizational objectives.
- Accessible and Timely Reports: All teams must have access to real-time and detailed cloud spending data to make informed decisions and adjust usage accordingly.
- Take Advantage of the Variable Cost Model: Cloud offers flexibility through its pay-as-you-go model. FinOps encourages organizations to leverage this by optimizing usage, rightsizing resources, and taking advantage of savings programs like Reserved Instances or Spot Instances.
FinOps Personas:
1. Engineers / Developers
- Role: Cloud users who design, build, and manage cloud infrastructure and services.
- Focus: Ensure that cloud resources are used efficiently while supporting innovation.
- Key Responsibilities:
- Optimize cloud resource usage.
- Align technical decisions with cost considerations.
- Understand cloud cost allocation and budgeting.
- FinOps Involvement: Engineers need to make informed decisions on provisioning and scaling cloud resources, using real-time cloud cost insights.
2. Finance / Procurement
- Role: Teams responsible for budgeting, forecasting, and cost control.
- Focus: Ensure financial accountability and manage cloud expenditures effectively.
- Key Responsibilities:
- Monitor and analyze cloud costs.
- Manage billing, budgets, and financial reporting.
- Work with technical teams to control spending and maximize savings.
- FinOps Involvement: Finance teams must ensure cloud expenses align with organizational budgets and financial goals, while collaborating with tech teams to optimize spending.
3. Executives / Leadership
- Role: Senior leaders who oversee business and strategic decisions.
- Focus: Align cloud investments with broader business goals and drive organizational efficiency.
- Key Responsibilities:
- Set financial and operational goals for cloud spending.
- Ensure cross-team collaboration on FinOps initiatives.
- Make strategic decisions based on cloud financial data and performance metrics.
- FinOps Involvement: Executives rely on insights from FinOps practices to ensure cloud investments drive business value and deliver ROI.
4. FinOps Practitioner
- Role: The central FinOps professional or team responsible for cloud financial operations.
- Focus: Coordinate between engineering, finance, and business teams to manage cloud costs efficiently.
- Key Responsibilities:
- Implement FinOps best practices across teams.
- Provide visibility and reporting on cloud costs and usage.
- Educate teams on cost management and drive collaboration.
- FinOps Involvement: The practitioner facilitates cloud cost optimization, bringing transparency, accountability, and collaboration across departments.
5. Product Owners / Managers
- Role: Individuals responsible for managing and delivering cloud-based products and services.
- Focus: Deliver products that meet customer needs while optimizing resource costs.
- Key Responsibilities:
- Balance performance and cost in product delivery.
- Track and manage the cost implications of product decisions.
- Collaborate with engineering and finance to manage the cloud budget for their product.
- FinOps Involvement: Product owners must ensure that cloud resource usage aligns with both customer needs and cost-efficiency goals.
FinOps Domains:
1. Understand Cloud Usage & Cost
The outcome of this Domain is a better understanding of an organization’s use of the cloud. Within this domain, organizations work to gather all the information required to perform FinOps. This includes direct and imputed cloud cost, cloud usage, observability, utilization, sustainability data, and other datasets required by any FinOps Domain.
2. Optimize Cloud Usage & Cost
This Domain focuses on cloud efficiency, ensuring organizations only use the resources when they provide value to the organization; and that resources used are purchased at the lowest acceptable cost and impact to meet the organization’s goals. Organizations will measure efficiency in a variety of ways, including monetary cost, carbon usage, or more traditional IT operational efficiency measures.
3. Manage the FinOps Practice
This Domain enables continuous improvement to change and align the entire organization – its people, processes and technology – to adopt FinOps and use the cloud in ways that create value for the company. Capabilities here are centred on effective FinOps operation, enablement of the whole organization, and improved interaction with all other personas and business functions to support and represent cloud use more effectively.
4. Quantify Business Value
Organisations develop Capabilities in this Domain to connect the usage and cost data with the business value it creates, helping ensure value is transparent and within expectations. Within this domain, organizations map monetary and non-monetary cloud costs to budgets, use historical information and future plans to forecast, establish and measure technical and organizational KPIs, and perform benchmarking across teams, business units and other organizations.
When all 4 are used together, they help businesses maintain transparency, optimise their cloud storage, and enforce governance. This helps the business keep spending under control while delivering value.
FinOps Capabilities:
- Allocation
- Anomaly Management
- Architecting for Cloud
- Benchmarking
- Budgeting
- Cloud Policy & Governance
- Cloud Sustainability
- Data Ingestion
- FinOps Assessment
- FinOps Education & Enablement
- FinOps Practice Operations
- FinOps Tools & Services
- Forecasting
- Intersecting Disciplines
- Invoicing & Chargeback
- Licensing & SaaS
- Onboarding Workloads
- Planning & Estimating
- Rate Optimization
- Reporting & Analytics
- Unit Economics
- Workload Optimization
These all sit under the different FinOps Domains.
FinOps Phases:
1. Inform Phase
- Goal: Create visibility and transparency into cloud spending.
- Key Activities:
- Provide detailed, real-time cloud cost data and reports to teams.
- Allocate costs to appropriate business units, projects, or teams.
- Enable stakeholders to understand usage patterns and cost drivers.
- Outcomes:
- Improved cost awareness.
- Clear accountability for cloud resources across teams.
2. Optimize Phase
- Goal: Maximize cloud efficiency by optimizing usage and costs.
- Key Activities:
- Identify opportunities to reduce waste (e.g., unused or underutilized resources).
- Leverage cost-saving measures such as Reserved Instances (RIs) or Spot Instances.
- Right-size cloud resources based on current needs.
- Outcomes:
- Reduced cloud waste and optimized spending.
- Better alignment of cloud resources with actual usage.
3. Operate Phase
- Goal: Continuously manage cloud performance and financial governance.
- Key Activities:
- Establish cloud spending policies and guardrails.
- Monitor and enforce compliance with cloud budgets and best practices.
- Continuously track performance metrics and adjust as needed.
- Outcomes:
- Continuous cloud financial management improvement.
- Ongoing alignment between cloud costs and business objectives.
These phases form a cyclical process that allows organizations to regularly evaluate and refine their cloud spending strategies to maximize value and ensure cloud financial accountability.
FinOps Maturity Model:
1. Crawl (Foundational)
- Description: Organizations at the “Crawl” stage are just beginning their FinOps journey, focusing on gaining visibility into cloud costs and assigning ownership.
- Key Focus Areas:
- Basic cost tracking and allocation.
- Awareness of cloud spending patterns.
- Establishing a centralized FinOps team.
- Limited automation and optimization efforts.
- Challenges:
- Lack of real-time visibility.
- Minimal collaboration between teams.
- Basic reporting capabilities.
2. Walk (Operational)
- Description: At this stage, organizations have developed stronger processes for managing cloud costs and begun to optimize their cloud spending.
- Key Focus Areas:
- Detailed cost reporting and real-time visibility.
- Optimizing cloud usage and implementing cost-saving measures.
- Collaboration between finance, operations, and engineering teams.
- Some automation of cost management processes.
- Challenges:
- Need for deeper integration of cost management with business objectives.
- Building stronger governance and controls.
3. Run (Advanced)
- Description: In the “Run” phase, organizations have fully integrated FinOps into their operations and have reached a high level of cloud financial management maturity.
- Key Focus Areas:
- Continuous optimization of cloud resources and proactive cost management.
- Real-time, automated reporting with predictive analytics.
- Strong collaboration across all teams, aligning cloud costs with business value.
- Advanced governance and compliance mechanisms.
- Challenges:
- Maintaining consistency across multiple teams and environments.
- Ensuring ongoing innovation while keeping costs in check.
Progressing Through the Model:
- Organizations move from visibility to optimization, and finally, to full operational excellence.
- The maturity model helps guide the FinOps team in building more robust processes, increasing automation, and aligning cloud costs with business value as they progress through each stage.
Some final thoughts that have helped me get my head around things:
It is about breaking down silos. So remember when we used to have a virtualisation team, a storage team, a networking team etc and as time has moved on, those teams have kind of blended into one or at the very least they talk to each other on a more regular basis and have a general understanding of each other’s roles and work. Well, that is what FinOps is doing with the whole financial side of things.
It’s not just about saving money! It is about making money through data-informed decisions.
If you remember these key things, you will be well on your way to passing this exam.
You might think after reading all that, there is a lot going on, but when you think about it, a lot of it seems a bit like common sense, especially if you have been working in the cloud one way or another for a few years, and its all about just tying it together.
To pass this exam I spent my time reading the Cloud FinOps 2nd addition eBook. I am not normally one for reading books end to end, but I found it interesting. There are Udemy courses as well, I bought one of them but realised I didn’t need it.
The exam is $300 which isn’t cheap, but you get 3 shots at the exam, and the key thing to know about the exam is it is NOT proctored. So, you can start it from your laptop and crack on, if you need to reference something you can do.
You get 50 questions and 60 minutes to finish it. If you have zero clue going in you are going to have a bad time, but if you have read the book, you’ll be able to answer most of the questions without much issue. There will be the odd few that you can search the book and reference for. If you tried to do that for al the questions, you wouldn’t finish the exam in time.
Hope that helps!
Bilal
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