Just thought I’d drop myself a line here and remind me about that time that I was getting FinOps certified, because it’s so much more interesting than I would’ve thought.
Basically, back in the old days, there were data centers and if you wanted a new resource in one of those data centers you had to go through a procurement cycle involving finance and probably a procurement team. You’d buy the resource and that would count as Cap Ex in your P&L or whatever. It’d get installed and then you could use it. That Cap EX would be depreciated and the world would keep turning, pretty predictably, just like the Finance teams likes it.
This meant much longer planning and procurement loops for most technology teams, loops that are gone now in the era of “Cloud” and “devops” generally. This is mostly great. It also meant that the old methods of controlling costs are gone and that the ability to spend company money has been handed directly to development teams. This is potentially bad.
This should require much more feedback between the two teams - Eng and Finance - and much greater visibility into the company’s resource usage for the Eng teams spending the money.
This is FinOps. A continual process of building, monitoring, and optimizing that allows companies to move SO much faster than they used to be able to.