“A matter of making money” – FinOps Foundation
Since the advent of cloud computing the world of technology has gained a dynamic of evolution never seen before. Traditionally, innovations in computing occurred synchronously between software and hardware, or vice versa, as the R&D areas (research and development) of large manufacturers brought the news. And this dictated the speed with which the performance gain arrived and revolutionized. This changed radically when server virtualization gained momentum and gained the necessary trust of skeptics, giving rise to the cloud universe we know today.
This universe, because in fact it has become so immeasurable that it is assimilated to the term, required changes in Traditional Systems Administration models, commonly managed by SysAdmins, or system administrators, who organized the growth of applications and then generated demands for the operations area to buy the equipment, understand here network servers, and only then put the environment into operation.
Months were lost in this process. And so we saw virtualization saving the world, allowing a virtual server environment to be previously available, being able to be consumed immediately, whenever necessary.
And then the term cloud computing gained momentum and definitely consolidated. It evolves in such a way that it was necessary to change the traditional SysAdmin model for a more agile, effective, horizontal one, called DevOps, coming from the junction of development and operations functions. The DevOps culture was crucial so that the big cloud computing players could be consumed without fear and with the practicality they preached to offer, which in fact is true.
This culture has allowed CI/CD Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery to facilitate the use of complex cloud environments, providing on-demand infrastructure with unprecedented agility.
This was a revolution in the decade from 2010 to 2020, causing small startups to transform into large businesses, with high added value, pleasing the large providers of cloud computing resources, since this made their business grow exponentially.
The rule was simple for this to happen: DevOps squads created automations for the integration of applications in cloud environments, allowing the delivery of computational resources to be instantaneous, making the business updated and meeting expectations of demands never experienced.
It was a haven for development and a dream for operations. However, it was the nightmare of the CFOs (Chief Financial Office), because they made them dwell on the salty invoices that did not stop growing and that they did not understand how to solve, because they knew little about the processes of development and consumption of resources in the IT area, which each time generated news uncontrollably.
It was a threat to the moving to cloud movement, so consolidated around 2016. Then, in mid-2018, many cloud experts began voicing their dissatisfaction with the financial disarray that a public cloud brought. An international community of professionals was then born that, in 2019, would become the FinOps Foundation, a non-profit trade association that would use the Agile concepts of the DevOps culture to then apply them in Cloud Financial Management, known internationally as CFM-Cloud Financial Management, or simply FinOps.
Using the same DevOps model, that is, agile squads formed by multidisciplinary teams, the FinOps culture implements in a practical way what CFOs dreamed of: a cloud cost management culture that really delivers results. And how does this work? Simple as it should be, the FinOps Foundation, now integrated into the Linux Foundation community, has defined good practices that allow the use of computational resources to follow corporate cloud spending guidelines, facilitating cost control that never existed.
Finops is an evolving cultural and disciplinary cloud financial management practice that enables organizations to realize maximum business value by helping engineering, finance, technology, and business teams collaborate on data-driven spending decisions.”
– https://www.finops.org/introduction/what-is-finops / in other words, an agile way to control cloud spending, which takes as a premise the observability in the face of monitoring, the acquisition and marketing options of cloud service players, business rules and continuous optimization. And this boils down to the three key phases of FinOps:
