The language of FinOps

Language has power. The power to communicate. It can save, uplift, deflate or kill a project.

It should go without saying, but communication in project management is the key to success, specially in FinOps.

For the uninitiated, FinOps is shorthand for Cloud Financial Management. It is the practice of bringing financial accountability to the variable spend model of the cloud. To gain more financial and operational control, efficient FinOps program is inculcated as a cultural practice in a cross-functional working team environment. For people who love equations, simply put,

Real-time cloud reporting + just-in-time processes + teams working together = FinOps

While a FinOps team doesn't have a default position within the organization, the recommended position would be to work directly under the COO and align alongside cloud tech operations team.

Now, Finance and Tech - woaah, someone has to play the devils advocate here because both speak a language of their own. Personal anecdote, non-tech peeps find absolutely unfathomable the existence of multiple virtual machines on a single ESX host, let alone motion of VMs in a cluster. While tech peeps can't wrap their mind around matching principle applied to accrual Thus, a key step is to align definitions and key terms across teams to build a common vocabulary for FinOps. Below are the set of 14 terms I’ve shortlisted which should be common in every organization’s FinOps dictionary:

FinOps is a world in itself – rather three worlds – AWS, Azure and GCP.  With a culture change and incorporation of efficient FinOps practice, you open a world of cost saving opportunities in Cloud. A few of them have been mentioned in my article here.

Start small, vision big – and collaborate :)

PS. Once you're familiar with the above terms, I have a whole section dedicated to successfully build tag/label hierarchy-based allocation strategy for cloud deployment within your organization. So, stay tuned...