FinOps X 2023: Day 1 Notes

FOCUS open source project is the main attraction

FinOps community hitting its stride

It was clear from minute one how much growth the FinOps community has had over the past year. The main room was buzzing, completely sold out, the vendor floor was flooded, 200 something turned away, the venue itself here in San Diego a big step up from last year’s inaugural event in Austin. 11,000 community members strong now and the energy level matched the numbers. The IBM acquisition of Apptio for $4.6bil juiced the hallway convos and gave additional market validation of the ecosystem. You can tell when a community is feeling that confidence, riding momentum, cultural identity shining through and this year is that moment for FinOps.

Themes of the Day

“Shift left FinOps” - DevOps and FinOps community merge

Natalie Daley from HSBC gave a great high level walk through of their FinOps journey along with a slide that I give a 9.5/10 for richness.

Her examples of how certain capabilities, like power scheduling, matured over time to eventually land in the Run phase. On looking towards the future the talking points made me chuckle a bit with how communities can follow same evolutionary paths, talk around the same principles with slightly modified language and unfortunately all too often (re)learn all the same lessons.

I heard the same principles as years past in DevOps, PaaS/Platform Eng communities in some cases borrowed language in others just new: culture > tooling, shift left, feedback loops, waste elimination, value identification.

My quick warning to the FinOps community here as someone who’s traveled this road many times before, pathological behavior of organizations is a critical friction point. It’s easier to identify and reward fire fighters than forrest management. If you want to move left, you have to face this head on. Ignore incentive structures at your own peril.

Mike Fuller talked about getting “data in the path” for engineers which is a similar trajectory security engineering took with DevSecOps and FinOps inevitably must take to get in “golden paths”.

This left me pondering an idea that I think could be very valuable but certainly interesting. Imagine a community mashup conference between FinOps and DevOps communities. There is much more common ground than assumed and our time to value would shrink considerably if we just broke down the silos. We’d learn things like not everyone in FinOps community has an excel tattoo and a pocket calculator and turns out not everyone in DevOps community has social anxiety and loves mechanical keyboards. Well maybe the latter is true but let’s make it happen anyway!

Unit Cost moves from wish list to must have

Equifax, HERE Technologies and several others have been discussing what has been the white whale of FinOps for some time and that is unit cost visibility. It’s important for the community to have organizations starting to realize this because it moves FinOps closer to business value than just waste management. That’s starting to happen as more companies move into walk and run stages. Broader realization on this capability will help close the gap on FinOps participation and tangible benefits as revealed in the Real State of FinOps research.

FOCUS takes main stage

FOCUS is the FinOps Open Cost & Usage Specification which has recently hit v0.5 milestone and is rapidly picking up community interest. Udam Dewaraja and Mike Fuller’s breakout room on FOCUS was standing room only with massive interest from practitioners, SaaS vendors and CSPs alike(cough except AWS cough).

This project to me represents the next cycle of FinOps growth and opportunity to impact the broader cloud industry in a significant way.

If we can normalize cost and usage data across CSPs, SaaS and in house data that will drive a few streams:

1. Multi-cloud: generally thought to be at worst foolish waste and at best a necessary evil/pain, we’d now be able to actually make intelligent workload placement choices and have a chance at making multi-cloud a true value add to our businesses.

2. Fully loaded unit cost: It’s impossible to over state how painful it is to stack fully loaded costs(licensing, observability, CI/CD, cloud hosting, shared costs, humans etc…). Everyone draws their own good enough line, but FOCUS would significantly lower the burden and raise the ceiling of what’s possible.

3. Community leverage vs bespoke execution: We’ve all been solving this our own way and making very little progress as an industry. FOCUS would represent a massive step forward industry wise that puts everyone on a different velocity curve for success.

I’m very excited for FOCUS and can’t wait to get more directly involved with that project, hope you do as well.