FinOps X 2024, held in late June in San Diego, brings together the best of the best people, companies, and tools to help with the management of cloud spend. This year provided a unique experience of hosting all three top public cloud providers – AWS, Microsoft, and Google – on the main stage together to discuss their plans for helping customers manage their cloud environments. Converge had a strong presence, participating in the sessions, meeting with customers, CSPs, and third-party ISVs that assist them with their cloud deployments.
Here are some of the significant highlights from the conference:
FinOps Has Become Everyone’s Job
All organizations must develop and follow best practices for cost and security. Future decisions must be made with cost awareness as a priority. FinOps has moved beyond the public cloud to include private cloud and adding new personas (ITAM, ITSM/ITIL, ITFM/TBM, etc.). FinOps has also evolved to integrate carbon-aware initiatives that cause decision making based around value and environmental impact.
AI for FinOps and FinOps for AI
Artificial intelligence is a big initiative not only for customers but also for the cloud service providers. Costs for AI have become increasingly difficult to manage and predict. Both cloud providers and third-party tools are developing solutions to manage AI deployment and spend, essentially “managing the cost of the magic.” Questions must be asked about the value of the services created using AI. All decisions must be made with cost awareness to ensure satisfaction and budget accommodation. A key discussion point was, how to build experimentation without maximized cost?
The Change in FinOps is Constant
There are no RUNNERS in FinOps. Practitioners and engineers are encouraged to slow down to walk and crawl rates. Multiple customers such as Disney and Uber provided scenarios where starting over might be more beneficial than fixing existing processes. Automation within FinOps should currently be considered a defect since most decisions are classified as reactive with constant change.
Introduction of FOCUS Specification 1.0
The intention of FOCUS is to provide trust and understanding of the data. This data comes in various forms and from many different data sources. FOCUS provides normalized costing usage data. This framework is open sourced through the FinOps.org community and version 1.0 is available for general availability. The goal is to create a Single Source of Truth for each organization.
Introduction of the FinOps Framework 2024
The 2024 domains include Understanding Cloud Usage & Cost, Quantifying Business Value, Optimizing Cloud Usage & Cost, and Managing the FinOps Practice. Within these domains, 22 capabilities have been defined and attributed. Six key personas were identified – Engineering, FinOps Practitioner, Finance, Procurement, Leadership and Product Management – all working with multiple allied personas such as ITAM and security. Reinforce the principle that FinOps is not about saving money, it is about making money. Practitioners should communicate within the language of the specific target persona.
Build vs Buy
FinOps.org recently completed an evaluation of their cloud management systems and determined that purchasing a tool provided better functionality at the cost point that met their needs. This solution provided better multi-cloud support, self-service access to billing data, repurposing of dashboards, least privilege access to billing data, automated reporting, and optimization recommendations. It also empowered teams to create budget alerts on their own. They emphasized that the lack of FinOps tooling is a technical debt. Despite the tool sets that they currently use, they still rely on manual processes and spreadsheets and expect to continue to do so in the future. FinOps is about people, processes, and technology working together.
Conclusion
FinOps X 2024 was an incredible conference, fostering collaboration between customers and vendors to help solve business challenges. We encourage all our cloud customers to attend future conferences to build a stable foundation for managing their cloud environments and spend. Converge is here to partner with our customers and provide recommendations and services based on the FinOps framework. Our cloud advisor team is certified by FinOps.org and have the qualifications to assist our customers. For videos and more information about FinOps, we encourage you watch videos provided on YouTube: FinOps Foundation – YouTube.
