In a month filled with news, the Linux Foundation recently expanded its scope to include the FinOps Foundation (F2). F2 joins Linux Foundation Public Health and the OpenSSF in the trio of new Linux Foundation initiatives and VMware is proud to be a founding member of each one. VMware joins the FinOps Foundation as a Premier member along with industry counterparts AWS, Microsoft, and Google among others.
FinOps, also known as Cloud Financial Management, is a movement that has grown up over the past several years to help organizations cope with the increasing challenges of managing and optimizing costs in the public cloud. Because of the on-demand nature and ability to rapidly scale in the public cloud, many of the accounting and budgeting practices that worked well in the data center start to break down in the cloud. Many early adopters of public cloud felt this pain quite acutely and blazed the trail of Cloud Financial Management that many others have followed over more recent years. But without a common foundation of definitions, metrics, processes and a common, open method to discuss and share best practices, progress stalled.
By joining the Linux Foundation, F2 looks to benefit from one of the largest and most prestigious open source foundations. The Linux Foundation’s open governance model will help democratize the voice of FinOps practitioners and provide an ability to discuss and define openly across vendors, users, and practitioners.
The Work Ahead
The formal mission of the FinOps Foundation is to:
- Provide a central community for Cloud Financial Management through virtual events, meetups, and Slack.
- Advance the careers of FinOps practitioners through career development, training and certification.
- Define Cloud Financial Management standards through open collaboration.
Unlike other code-oriented initiatives of The Linux Foundation, the FinOps Foundation will focus efforts on open source definitions, standards and best practices, rather than open source software (at least for now!). There’s plenty of work ahead, with plans to not only build a community but to develop and deliver education and certification programs, hold FinOps community events and of course make all of this open and available to all on GitHub.
The CloudHealth team at VMware will spearhead contributions to the community and help grow F2’s impact in the industry. One VMware executive and one technical leader will join the governance board and technical advisory councils to launch the initial work. The CloudHealth team will join the community to actively collaborate and improve upon the best practices, research and analysis, and templates developed to date. By engaging with a wider community, the power of open source will result in more insights, more use cases and in the end, a better outcome.
If your organization is rapidly scaling in the public cloud, the FinOps Foundation will be an excellent resource for you as you navigate challenges related to cost and optimization. If you aren’t already a member of the FinOps Foundation, consider joining today!
