Another FinOps X in the books! This industry has built momentum through the last few years, and so has this conference. The value of the conference continues to be in the conversations held throughout the conference, with everyone speaking the same language and eager to learn and network with fellow FinOps enthusiasts.
Throughout the conference there were consistent topics and challenges presented e by FinOps practitioners. From meeting with customers to attending sessions, I’ve captured my biggest takeaways from this year’s conference to share with you.
Key takeaways
FinOps for AI, not just AI for FinOps
It seemed as if there was a requirement for every speaker to bring up AI at least once in their presentation—it was the topic on everyone’s minds. Seriously, though, one of the ways that presented consistently referenced AI was in the context of how it can be used to improve certain tasks, from writing code to optimizing OpenSearch usage. With all of the excitement of building AI into day-to-day tasks, one thing that is often overlooked is FinOps for AI. Due to the massive cost and energy consumption of AI workloads, it is more important than ever to incorporate FinOps best practices into AI usage and constantly reevaluate applications.
AWS, Azure, GCP, and Oracle now support FOCUS 1.0
Four different cloud providers now offer billing export support for the 1.0 FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) schema! FOCUS is an open source specification with the goal of normalizing data sets across providers. This is a major step for the advancement of FinOps and demonstrates the commitment that AWS, Azure, GCP, and Oracle have to the project and industry. You can find more information about it here.
Companies are having a difficult time navigating acquisitions
One of the challenges we constantly see is how companies are navigating acquisitions. More often than not, the company with smaller cloud spend must adopt the practices of the company with larger spend. This can lead to a number of issues, as it assumes that the amount of cloud spend is correlated with FinOps maturity, an assumption that is not necessarily correct. It’s possible that the company with smaller cloud spend may have more mature FinOps practices. We have seen this anywhere from tagging, to managing rate optimization, to the FinOps tools used. With each organization having an average of 4.1 FinOps tools, and with the breadth of the market, there is a significant chance that there will be overlap in products. It’s critical that the FinOps teams come with an open mind and be prepared to make adjustments, even if their consolidated bill is larger.
Integrating FinOps with private cloud
“FinOps extends beyond public cloud.”
J.R. Storment, Executive Director of the FinOps Foundation, during the opening keynote.
We have seen this sentiment play out a few ways while working with customers at CloudHealth. First, not all applications are best suited for the cloud. In recent years, there has been a major push to move all applications to the cloud without evaluating if ant application is best suited for it. There are also cases of applications migrating to the cloud for which usage changed over time, and they end up being better suited to be migrated back.
Second, if applications are moving between public and private clouds, teams must be speaking the same language across both. Without a common language, companies will run into issues around tagging, rate optimization, and reporting (just to name a few). For instance, if a company has built automation for things like lights on/lights off, an application can easily move between private and public if the tagging is normalized. Chargeback/showback is also likely done differently between public and private, but if there is consistent tagging and access through reports, this will be a seamless transition.
Something to call out on this topic: The definition of FinOps within the FinOps Foundation is limited to the public cloud. There are a few of us on the FinOps Foundation’s Technical Advisory Council that are working to update the definition to include private cloud, so look for that in the next release!
People are excited about Tanzu Hub
The CloudHealth team was extremely excited to demo the tech preview of our new CloudHealth user experience at our booth. FinOps X was the very first time it was demonstrated live to customers! We were so glad to see customers exploring the new experience and its features, including the multi-cloud generative AI assistant, optimization dashboard, and realized savings metrics. To learn more about the new experience, check out our blog.
We will be publishing more information about the new CloudHealth experience throughout the summer and are excited to make it available for all customers. As always, we are excited to continue our close relationship with the FinOps Foundation and engagement with the FinOps community!
