Understanding cloud usage and costs
FinOps, or Cloud Financial Management, is based on a framework able to deliver the best practices in financial management in cloud computing.
This framework has six domain areas, capable of structuring and organizing agile management methods and processes that will provide the best possible scenario for a cloud environment.
Domain I - understanding cloud usage and costs
Starting from the principle that it is only measured here that it is measured, to understand how your cloud is available for use and how much it is consuming its financial resources, it is possible to define strategies capable of managing and controlling costs.
This understanding goes through business logic, peak hours and idleness of use, models for purchasing computational resources, distribution of microservices and much more.
Domain II-Performance Monitoring and benchmarking
Domain II in the FinOps Framework, which enables state-of-the-art cloud cost management, deals with monitoring the performance of your cloud, not only in the operational sense but also in the consumption of financial resources; in addition to comparing and evaluating what similar businesses, in different players, perform differently that can help improve your productivity.
This means that it is not enough to reduce infrastructure based on cost reduction without understanding how much this is impacting the performance of the environment, in the computational and usability sense.
Comparing similar and even different scenarios, evaluating different strategies in different cloud players, can help define metrics that can make your processes more agile in terms of acquisition and consumption of resources. The result of this will be an optimization capable of delivering the fine-tuning needed to align your operation with what matters: using what you need, paying only for that use.
Domain III-real-time decision making
The great advantage we have today when using observability, instead of cloud monitoring, is to enjoy the benefits of being proactive. Proactivity allows, for example, to estimate performance risks according to analysis statistics obtained from both Business Intelligence solutions and improvements based on Artificial Intelligence.
And this means being able to make decisions in real time just by observing behaviors that may happen if a certain scenario is maintained.
Domain IV-cloud optimization rate optimize to save
This is a phrase that haunts managers of cloud environments, especially those who have large workloads and with constant changes, which aim to always follow the behavior of end users and meet their demands.
However, the optimization of cloud environments needs to be measured and monitored to understand exactly the results obtained, or all effort will be in vain as soon as the next service update happens. Domain III of FinOps practices for cloud cost management provides for controlling cloud optimization rates and how effective they are being without harming the business.
Domain V - Cloud usage optimization
The fifth domain of FinOps practices for cloud cost management is about optimizing the use of computational resources. This means the intense execution of observability on everything that is consumed in a complex environment. Evaluating in real time what is used and trying to extract the most from resources, consuming less, is a job that requires experts who experience the routines of cloud provider players, since they are dynamic and improve their processes every day.
Understanding purchasing options, tailoring workloads to your requirements, making dynamic substitutions, allocating resources on demand, and many other actions will only be possible if you have artificial intelligence working for you to manage so many variables.
This measurement must be done in a framework capable of delivering the necessary visibility of the real-time performance of a cloud environment, making comparisons between past and predictive statuses, enabling what we call an ideal scenario through dynamic resource optimization.
Domain VI - Organizational alignment
Finishing the series of the six domains of a framework for FinOps practices we arrive at what matters most in companies: people. People are the fundamental piece for any cost management framework to work, especially when we arrive at organizational alignment, that is, when people have the same purposes, know them and follow them.
Alignment between areas is one of the most difficult tasks to achieve cost reduction goals and requires the adoption of a culture focused on continuous optimization, whether of processes, methods or use of computational resources. Calls of Personas in the FinOps process, are distributed in five levels:
