FinOps goes mainstream
It's often the case that the most sustainable path is also the least expensive, and this is certainly the case when it comes to cloud.
Cloud infrastructure has always been sold on the premise of elasticity. DevOps needs agility and only cloud can deliver that degree of agility. The problem is that when it's that easy to commission cloud instances it's easy to forget about costs - and decommissioning infrastructure that you no longer fully utilise.
FinOps is a portmanteau of Finance and DevOps, and it arose relatively recently out of a need to improve collaboration between financial and engineering parts of an enterprise, primarily when it came to cloud costs, which are by any measure exceeding expectations. Cloud migration projects are also prone to coming in over-budget.
FinOps is a cultural practice that devolves ownership and responsibility for cloud usage and maximises ROI by helping all of the teams commissioning cloud services to collaborate. Practiced properly it should lower the risks of cloud migrations, control costs and maximise ROI. Many enterprises are still very early on in the FinOps maturity model, but 2023 is likely to see maturity increase and FinOps entering the tech culture mainstream as enterprise seeks to lower costs and reduce risk.
