Over the past several months, CoLab executives and customers have told us that managing cloud spend is a big challenge. 

And it’s no wonder – cloud spend is rising, predicted to reach $791 billion by 2028 and growing at a 17% CAGR. McKinsey reported that enterprises believe 30% of their cloud spend goes to waste yearly, leaving hundreds of billions of dollars on the table. 

Managing cloud spend is a tricky problem. There are often multiple stakeholders involved, all with different metrics they’re responsible for managing. Finance may be interested in improving gross margins, while the engineering and product teams are focused on maximizing their product’s performance and reliability.

To make matters more difficult, the metrics and tooling associated with managing the cloud and managing spend are siloed, and might speak the language of one department, but not the other. 

To bring these competing objectives together, a new domain has emerged. “FinOps” (a portmanteau of “Finance” and “DevOps”, according to the FinOps Foundation) helps companies of all sizes adopt the tools and practices to reduce spend without sacrificing performance.

What is FinOps?

FinOps coming into the zeitgeist is like the rise of DevOps in 2007 to 2008, when developers (those writing the code) and IT (those deploying and supporting the code) were fundamentally at odds with each other – often having competing goals, different department heads, and even sitting on different office floors from each other. 

As with DevOps, FinOps has brought a flurry of best practices and (Read more...)