Cost visibility: Full visibility into cloud spending across different services, departments or projects is a crucial component to FinOps success. Complete visibility helps you identify baseline spend, cost trends, outliers and potential areas for optimization as practices mature
Cost allocation: Allocating cloud costs to different business units, projects, and outcomes is necessary for accountability and resource optimization. It allows you to identify which teams are using resources, what business outcomes they’re achieving using these resources and identify the efficiency of spend related to outcomes
Budgeting and forecasting: Setting budgets and forecasting future cloud expenses helps you plan your spending and allocate resources appropriately. It also enables you to identify cloud spend anomalies and take appropriate action once identified
Resource optimization: FinOps emphasizes finding opportunities to optimize cloud resource usage and take advantage of cloud provider discounting models, which can include rightsizing instances, using reserved instances or spot instances, and automating scaling based on demand
Collaboration: FinOps at its core is all about collaboration between various stakeholders, including finance, operations and engineering. This ensures cloud costs are managed holistically and aligned with your organization's overall objectives
Tools and automation: To assist with the complex process of maturing FinOps practices and getting the most out of FinOps efforts, tools and platforms are available to help you manage, optimize and govern cloud costs. These tools provide insights, recommendations and automation to streamline the FinOps process
Continuous improvement: FinOps is not a one-time effort but an ongoing process of monitoring, analyzing and optimizing cloud costs. Regular reviews and adjustments are essential to achieve sustained cost savings, utilizing automation and governance to scale results and get the most out of cloud spend
By adopting FinOps practices, you can achieve better cost control, make data-driven decisions and maximize the value you get from your cloud investments.
Source: FinOps Foundation