As businesses grow their spend in the public cloud to accelerate innovation and to build a competitive advantage, predicting cloud growth accurately short- to long-term becomes increasingly important for leadership. Finance and executives need to know available funds several years into the future to build their innovation roadmap.
In this course, you are going to learn about cloud forecasting and how to align forecasting models with the maturity of your FinOps / Cloud Financial Management practice. You will learn about the relevant terms and concepts as well as how to identify ownership and accountability. We will break down the challenge into addressable parts and walk you through solution approaches at each step.
Learning Objectives
- Understand what cloud forecasting is and why it's important
- Understand what challenges exist in cloud forecasting and how to address them
- Learn about the different ways you can forecast in the cloud
- Learn about what you can do to improve cloud forecasting
- Learn about the role forecasting plays in FinOps
Intended Audience
- This course is for FinOps / Cloud Financial Management and Finance people looking to understand how to improve cloud forecasting and how to increase forecast accuracy.
Prerequisites
A basic understanding of how the cloud works, including compute and storage services and their pricing models, as well as an understanding of the financial processes around forecasting, budgeting, procurement, and allocations.
Welcome to our “Cloud Forecasting” course. I’m Dieter Matzion and I will be your instructor.
In this course, you are going to learn about cloud forecasting and why it is important for the business. Specifically, I will teach you what challenges exist in cloud forecasting and how to address them.
This course is intended for Cloud Financial Management or FinOps and Finance people looking to understand how to improve cloud forecasting and how to increase forecast accuracy.
Viewers should understand the basics of how the cloud works. Specifically, you should be familiar with the key services for compute and storage for the cloud providers your business is using. Additionally, you should understand the billing and pricing models for these services. Viewers will also need to understand financial processes around forecasting, budgeting, procurement, and allocations.
By the end of this course, you will know the different ways we can forecast in the cloud, what you can do to improve cloud forecasting, and the role forecasting plays in FinOps.
For people new to FinOps or Cloud Financial Management, I recommend that you watch my course titled "Cloud Financial Management — Beyond Just Optimization" where I explain the FinOps Principles and how to build FinOps Teams as well as the three phases of the FinOps Lifecycle.
And if you are new to the cloud, I recommend that you watch my introduction course titled "Cost Optimization Strategies for the Cloud" where I explain fundamental cloud principles like: Speed of innovation, Elasticity, and Undifferentiated heavy lifting.
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.