What is FinOps?

There are many times in the high-tech industry that there are new buzz words. One of those new titles we keep hearing about is a "FinOps" engineer.

So, what is it? In short - Technical optimizer for cloud services.

If the old approach was to train engineers to be the link between the development process and the operations, the new logical adaptation for this approach is to figure out the best way to maintain minimal infrastructure services to lower costs and increase productivity, meaning, the connection between the DevOps or System team to finance, and between system and finance to the cloud providers you're working with.

As this field is growing and starting to better define itself, we can point the area of responsibility of the FinOps engineer:

1. Creating full visibility on costs over cloud infrastructure

2. Getting alerts/notifications on price jumps, new agendas, and general growth

3. Maintaining budget and forecast and work closely with the finance team

4. Be an active part as the technical advisor for contracts and pricing negotiations

This requires a company to culturally adapt this new approach (as DevOps and agile development), shift how the teams operate and are more cost oriented.

Our goal, as FinOps Engineers, is to create visibility in the organization for our cloud spend, lead the technical optimization to improve performance and efficiency and reduce the cost while scaling the activity up.