What is Finops?

FinOps, short for "Finance and DevOps," is a cloud financial management discipline and cultural practice that enables organizations to optimize their spending by fostering collaboration between engineering, finance, technology, and business teams. It is a way for teams to manage their cloud costs, with everyone taking ownership of their usage and supported by a central best-practices group.

FinOps is all about removing blockers, empowering engineering teams to deliver better features and apps faster, and enabling cross-functional conversations about where and when to invest. It is an iterative practice that improves with repetition, with organizations starting small and growing in scale, scope, and complexity as business value warrants.

FinOps stakeholders include executives, engineers, finance and procurement, and individuals at every level of the organization have a different role to play.

FinOps Practice Maturity

FinOps is an iterative practice where the maturity of any given process or activity improves over time. Organizations typically start by being reactive and addressing problems as they occur, in a "Crawl" stage. As they mature, they proactively factor cost into their architecture design choices and ongoing engineering processes, in a "Run" stage. The "Crawl, Walk, Run" approach to FinOps allows organizations to start small and gradually increase in scale, scope, and complexity as business value warrants. By taking quick action at a small scale, FinOps teams can assess the outcomes of their actions and gain insights into the value of taking further action in a larger, faster, or more granular way.

what is finops

FinOps Stakeholders

FinOps is not solely the responsibility of a single person or team, but rather a way for engineering, finance, and business teams to work together to optimize spending. Individuals at every level of the organization can play a role in the FinOps practice, including executives, engineers, FinOps practitioners, operations, finance, and procurement. A central FinOps function may work to enable the necessary organizational change, but the success of FinOps relies on the collaboration and participation of all relevant teams and individuals.

FinOps Principles

Teams need to collaborate
Everyone takes ownership for their cloud usage
A centralized team drives FinOps
Reports should be accessible and timely
Decisions are driven by business value of cloud
Take advantage of the variable cost model of the cloud.

Sela provides FinOps services to its cloud customers in several models (proactive, on-demand, and as-a-service). The goals of our FinOps team align with the FinOps principles, and our mission is to optimize the cost of cloud usage for our customers. Sela’s customers receive a free multi-cloud cost allocation and optimization tool (Anodot for Cloud Cost) and continuous support from our FinOps engineers in their journey to optimize their cloud cost.