The course is part of this learning path
As spending on the public cloud is increasing globally, companies are looking for ways to reduce cost and increase efficiency. Financial Operations, or FinOps, is similar to DevOps, which enables companies to accelerate technology delivery. FinOps is a new operating model that maximizes the value of an organization's cloud investment.
In this course, you are going to learn about FinOps Principles and how to build FinOps Teams, as well as the three phases of the FinOps Lifecycle. Specifically, you will learn how to apply FinOps processes and practices to reduce rates and avoid unnecessary cloud costs.
If you have any feedback on this course, please get in touch with us at support@cloudacademy.com.
Learning Objectives
- Understand what makes the cloud so powerful and why it is changing how businesses operate
- Understand what makes cloud challenging from a technology, management, and financial perspective
- Learn about the six FinOps Principles and how to build successful FinOps Teams
- Learn about FinOps capabilities and how to build a common language within your organization
- Learn about the anatomy of a cloud bill and how to take advantage of the Basic Cloud Equation
- Learn about the three phases of the FinOps Lifecycle and how to build successful processes and practices to reduce rates and avoid cost
Intended Audience
This course is for engineers, operations, and Finance people looking to understand how to improve efficiency and reduce cost in the cloud.
Prerequisites
to get the most out of this course, you should have a foundational understanding of cloud concepts, specifically how compute and storage are provisioned and billed in the cloud. Some familiarity with rate reduction and cost avoidance methods in the cloud would also be helpful but are not essential.
References
The FinOps Lifecycle section of this course references materials from:
The Anatomy of a Cloud Bill lecture references materials from:
- Cloud FinOps: Collaborative, Real-Time Cloud Financial Management, O'Reilly Media; 1st edition (January 7, 2020)
The FinOps lifecycle follows the three phases of the Crawl, Walk, Run methodology. Specifically, the FinOps lifecycle has the Inform Phase where the FinOps team creates visibility into rates, usage, and cloud spend across the organization. Next is the Optimize Phase where we look for ways to improve rates and usage to reduce cost. This is where we build business cases for right-sizing, cloud parking, auto scaling, and re-architecting workloads. In the Operate Phase, we take action and make decisions. This is where we execute on the business cases we built and go after the opportunities we found.
I will go into much more detail for each of these phases next. Before we continue I like to explain that the FinOps Lifecycle is a loop, not a linear path where we are done with the Operate Phase. The FinOps Lifecycle is a continuous process which allows FinOps teams to build the skills and knowledge when performing the activities in the FinOps Capabilities, following the FinOps Principles, in rapid repetition. Teams will get better as they exercise this lifecycle, with the goal of exercising the FinOps lifecycle as quickly and as often as possible.
Please note: this lecture references materials from:
Dieter Matzion is a member of Intuit’s Technology Finance team supporting the AWS cost optimization program.
Most recently, Dieter was part of Netflix’s AWS capacity team, where he helped develop Netflix’s rhythm and active management of AWS including cluster management and moving workloads to different instance families.
Prior to Netflix, Dieter spent two years at Google working on the Google Cloud offering focused on capacity planning and resource provisioning. At Google he developed demand-planning models and automation tools for capacity management.
Prior to that, Dieter spent seven years at PayPal in different roles ranging from managing databases, network operations, and batch operations, supporting all systems and processes for the corporate functions at a daily volume of $1.2B.
A native of Germany, Dieter has an M.S. in computer science. When not at work, he prioritizes spending time with family and enjoying the outdoors: hiking, camping, horseback riding, and cave exploration.