Summary Bullets:
• With AWS’ first-time attendance, all three cloud giants were present at FinOps X this year.
• The cost of AI will impact FinOps budgets.
No one is “running” in FinOps, said FinOps Foundation executive director J.R. Storment during last week’s June 19-22, 2024 FinOps X keynote speech. Storment described new community project stages as either being in the crawl, walk, or run phase, depending on their technology evolution and adoption rates. The FinOps X conference has only been around since 2022 but is quickly garnering a following, not only of technology and cloud leaders, but also various personas dedicating careers to the emerging space. Workers range from traditional IT operations professionals to non-IT workers coming from accounting and finance backgrounds as part of a reskilling trend happening in this sector. FinOps, short for financial operations, refer to sets of cloud cost management tools. The practice encompasses a relatively new operational framework and initiative being more broadly recognized among enterprises undergoing digital transformations by migrating applications to the cloud and/or creating cloud native apps.
A number of trends emerged from last week’s conference, including the notion that FinOps is not just about having a better handle on cloud costs and optimizations. FinOps is increasingly also being applied to expenses associated with application deployments, which are on-premises, in the cloud, or a hybrid of these models, including multi-cloud distributions. Similarly, FinOps Foundation heads are challenging industry participants to include SaaS models in their FinOps practices as well, and for solutions providers to extend the powerful tools to include software services. These executives, including Storment and others, dedicated to running the project in recent years under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation have made impressive headway in shining a light on the need for improved cloud cost transparency and optimization associated with the rising costs of app modernizations.
The conference, in turn, provided a forum for cloud leaders to reframe customer assumptions related to hidden fees and surprise bills associated with cloud services. There is a general consensus that platform providers, namely Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), have a ways to go in providing enterprises with greater visibility into cloud costs and improved efficiencies. Many believe the slow pace among cloud providers in standardizing and formalizing cloud billing has been deliberate or “by design,” preferring instead to focus on upselling platform services to enterprises, which are overwhelmed with supporting high-impact initiatives driven by their platform engineering and development teams.
Not surprisingly, another major theme during the FinOps gathering was AI for FinOps, or more specifically applying generative AI (GenAI) copilot/assist interfaces to FinOps processes. Imagine a non-technical, non-FinOps expert bypassing the need to learn complex billing, budget, and forecast processes by simply asking a GenAI tool a question in natural language such as: What were my compute costs for Project X last month? Google and Microsoft have such capabilities in the works, among other providers. AI and GenAI will continue to impact enterprises’ operations costs as new use cases unfold, so FinOps integrations will continue.
Recapping a few key announcements made during the conference:
• Perhaps the most pivotal and foundational announcement of the week was the FinOps Foundation’s general availability of FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) 1.0, a unifying format for cloud bills. A major win by backers of the FinOps initiative is the fact that most of the industry’s cloud leaders, including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, have rallied behind the technology and launched native support for FOCUS.
• Google announced an updated BigQuery view feature that transforms its format to better align with FOCUS, in addition to a FOCUS Looker view that works with the new BigQuery version. The new features add visualization and filter capabilities within the Google Cloud billing data, including costs, changes, services, and regions. Features also reduce manual input requirements via the LookML template for code creation and management automation. Further, Google is embedding Google Cloud Assist with reports for querying and summarizing FinOps requests.
• Attending FinOps X for the first time, AWS announced a round-up of product updates and recaps based on a few key initiatives: ‘Cost Optimization Hub,’ aggregating cost-saving recommendations; ‘AWS Billing and Cost Management Console,’ with key CFM metrics; ‘Savings Plans,’ a recommendation visual representation; and new right-sizing programs around AWS RDS serving as optimization recommendations, among other new capabilities.
Going forward, cloud providers will see increased interest among enterprise customers, including engineering and development teams demanding tools that help them keep in line with their spend commitments associated with modern app development. In coming months, enterprises can expect to see continued FinOps integration through APIs, user interface consoles, and autonomous databases. FinOps will also play a key role in the ongoing consolidation of broader observability/automation solutions by application platform providers.