FinOps in the DevOps environment: You build it, You run it, You budget for it

The ability for a company to adapt quickly has become paramount for survival over the past couple of years, with the need to rapidly respond to customer and market demands. With this, there has been a wide adoption of Agile methodologies and Cloud services, both increasing response times and flexibility of a company. Between 2021 and 2022 the DevOps environment grew by 19%. In 2022, 94% of companies were using cloud services. This article explores the link between FinOps and DevOps. Outlining how they support each other and can be used to get the most out of your cloud environment.

Financial Operations (FinOps) creates an environment where you can see where expenditure is going; Highlighting the current state, pain points and other issues. Companies are adopting this because it helps companies to successfully manage costs alongside aligning cloud and business objectives. Across your cloud bill, it is reasonable to expect an optimisation of around 10%, whilst deploying effective and mature FinOps practises can reduce cloud expenditure by 20-30% in the long run with our clients achieving their ROI in less than 1 year.

During the FinOps lifecycle there are three main stages; Knowledge, Optimise and Industrialise.

Knowledge and Understanding

Cloud consumption data needs to be accessible and understandable. Clarify your invoice, to understand each line of expenditure in order to know precisely its costs. The data is commonly presented through dashboards for increased visibility on top consuming.

Optimise Cloud Invoice

The main objective of FinOps is to exploit optimisation levels to reduce Cloud costs. This can take several forms, depending on the maturity and scope of the type of services consumed. Whether this is right-sizing, auto turn-off or other similar activities.

Maintain and Industrialise

FinOps should not be one off but instead embedded into the BAU Cloud process, and recurring practices need to be defined. Acculturate the teams and automate as much as possible.

Further details on the three stages can be found in The 3-stage lifecycle for FinOps Best Practice article.

FinOps in DevOPs

Engineers implicitly make purchasing decisions whenever they create or modify a solution, however, they traditionally do not manage the associated long-term costs. The target state is for the engineering team to take responsibility of FinOps and hence their own P&L.

Although for many companies this is a daunting step, it has been seen to promoting accountability, driving culture change, and producing financial savings.

Engineering teams are best positioned to assess their cloud usage and to identify any utilisation inefficiency. By empowering the engineering teams to make allows for fast paced change, they can review the current position, identify inefficiencies. This drives the fast-paced change that is required in order for businesses to succeed.

Culture change is driven through this empowerment, leading to a more motivated team. It has been shown that giving an individual or a team responsibility and ownership leads to the team being more engaged and proactive in their daily activities. Making FinOps visible makes it more effective, the goal is for companywide transparency, building ambassadors for change and providing recognition for implementing solutions. Once this has happened you can build the culture for autonomous change and a constant drive for improvement.

At Wavestone, the DevOps ethos from “You build it, you run it” into “You build it, you run it”. Driving financial awareness, culture change and accountability.

Georgina King

At Wavestone, we are helping our clients to transform the DevOps ethos from You build it, You run it into You build it, You run it, You budget it. Driving financial awareness, culture change and accountability.

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