After you’ve read this book, we encourage you to get involved with the FinOps Foundation’s various programs as a pathway to continue honing your skills and career. The mission of the foundation is to advance every individual who manages the value of the cloud. The community is there for you. We hope that the real-world strategies, processes, and stories in this book will inspire everyone to better take control of cloud spend. And in the process, we can make our organizations, and our own careers, more competitive.

Who Should Read This Book

Anyone working in engineering, finance, procurement, product ownership, or leadership in a company running—or aspiring to run—in the public cloud will benefit from this book. As an organization understands the personas in FinOps, it can map them to relevant teams across the business.

Engineers are most likely not used to thinking about costs as a day-to-day concern. In the precloud days, they were mainly worried about performance in relation to hardware. Constrained by procurement and unable to get more servers whenever they needed them, they had to plan far in advance. They have to think about the cost of their infrastructure choices and its impact on the business. At first, this can feel foreign and at odds with their primary focus of shipping product and feature enhancements. Over time they add cost as another efficiency metric that they can tune to positively impact the business.

Finance traditionally focused on retroactive reporting on a monthly or quarterly granularity, based on set budgets that quickly became out of date. The job has evolved now to help enable the business to continually move forward, and to proactively partner with tech and engineering teams to forecast spend, based on the actions of engineers (who aren’t used to thinking about that cost). In other words, they’re shifting from opaque and fixed capital expenditure (CapEx) reporting to transparent and fluid operational expenditure (OpEx) forecasting. As part of that role, finance teams become engineering team partners who understand what the drivers of cloud spend are amid thousands of SKUs. They help to fundamentally reinvent how to perform the finance function, while also rethinking how to report technology spend to executives and investors.

Procurement teams are used to tightly controlled spending, careful rate negotiations, and wielding the power of the purchase order before vendors get paid. Now procurement teams become strategic sourcing. They pull all rogue spending together into an enterprise agreement with their cloud service provider to get the best rates for what engineers are already using to deliver value.

Product owners, responsible for the cost and margins of their products, struggled in the precloud world to understand all the costs that went into servicing a customer or operating a commercial offering. Cloud lets them understand more, or all, of the cost of delivering digital value, understand the cost impact of new features, and see how customer use cases create variability in the cost of an application. This allows product teams to collaborate much more effectively with engineering teams developing the products, to forecast revenue and margin more effectively, and to target customer demand much more efficiently.

Leadership, C-level executives, VPs, directors, or technology leaders managing budgets for a team have often lost direct control of cloud spending decisions and now rely on their teams to operate within reasonable budgets. Tech executives no longer plan large purchase decisions far in advance. Instead, they think more about how to forecast and manage spending that’s already happening. The conversation has shifted from ensuring services have the capacity to ensuring that they’re spending the right amount of money for the job. They want more control over how much is spent and more ability to strategically influence where it is spent.

This book seeks to break down barriers between these personas by laying out a common lexicon and set of best practices to follow.