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Cloud costs. We all know that there’s no such thing as a free lunch and, for the most part, there’s no such thing as a free cloud computing ‘instance’ or free cloud workload related to serving some always-on cloud application or data service. You might be logging into some free online cloud service to book a flight or even to use a rudimentary email service, but the truth is a) someone is paying for the cloud servers to whirr and spin away somewhere and b) any extended use of a free cloud service for professional or enterprise purposes typically costs money.
Because cloud costs money, we have FinOps. A portmanteau coming together of ‘finance’ and ‘IT operations’, FinOps is defined by the FinOps Foundation as follows:
FinOps is an operational framework and cultural practice which maximizes the business value of cloud, enables timely data-driven decision-making and creates financial accountability through collaboration between [software]
engineering, finance and business teams.As FinOps now bids to become as widely recognized and as embraced and accepted as DevOps (software development + operations), SecOps (security + operations), MLOps (operations aligned to serve Machine Learning) and all the other Ops functions all the way through to NoOps (a complete automated IT infrastructure) and XOps (everything you can think of, with a side of Ops), we now see various firms emerging as FinOps platform purists creating technologies that work specifically in this space.
Maryland-headquartered CloudBolt is one of those organizations; its self-stated mission is to be ‘singularly focused’ on solving what it claims is the most pressing problem with cloud today: increasing return on investment (ROI). The company is now offering augmented FinOps capabilities, by making use of AI/ML-informed insights and applying intelligent automation and orchestration proactively and retrospectively for cloud lifecycle optimization.
Failure to buy cloud ‘on value’
“We want to challenge the market and challenge the customer,” said CloudBolt CEO Craig Hinkley. “As companies start to increase their understanding of cloud spend, they are quickly beginning to realize that it's not just about reducing cloud spend. It's about assessing the strategic value. This value-centricity goes above and beyond cost optimization - that should be FinOps ground zero - the way forward is to look at going way further than mere tactical savings. In a world where value is rarely the primary driver of decision-making in most organizations in any industry, we will provide tools that will give users insights into the cloud value layer that they have never had access to before - and then, we won’t stop there, we will work with customers to drive those kinds of best practices outward across an entire organization.”
When it talks about so-called 'Augmented FinOps' CloudBolt is referring to its injection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in its cloud financial management platform. Designed to be applied to any cloud type (private, on-premises or public) from any cloud hyperscaler vendor, the company is announcing capabilities that support cloud engineering and operations to better understand the financial implications of their actions at any state of resource lifecyle. The dream state is to move away from merely reacting to waste once it happens to ultimately preventing it from happening in the first place.
“Surging cloud costs continue to be a huge headache for IT leaders. Augmented FinOps is the remedy and we're well-positioned to partner with the FinOps Foundation to help advance and educate the industry on this evolving discipline," said Campos. "Enterprises are grappling with how to balance cloud costs amid the increasing pressure to adopt and operationalize leading-edge technologies and applications including AI/ML. With CloudBolt’s new capabilities, organizations can optimize cloud spend automatically. Instead of worrying about wasted money and resources, they can focus on what matters most - delivering business value,” said Kyle Campos, CloudBolt’s chief technology and product officer. “In doing so, users will finally be able to enjoy complete cloud lifecycle optimization by more rapidly and confidently turning insights into actions that maximize cloud ROI and pave the way for customers to solve higher order business problems.”
FinOps, formalized
Hinkley asserts that traditional FinOps tooling is incapable of solving the cloud ROI challenge by solely focusing on a retrospective analysis of a company’s cloud spend (to detail who spent what, where and when, basically). Even then, while almost three-quarters of companies now have formal FinOps practices in place now (according to research carried out under CloudBolt’s sponsorship), he believes companies are still struggling to maximize cloud value.
Analyst house Gartner backs up this thought and proposes that, “Current FinOps implementations fall short in the area of augmented functionality, which provides intelligent observability linked to tailored recommendations and actions that smartly optimize cloud spend.” (Gartner, Emerging Tech: Data Management Product Leaders Must Implement Augmented FinOps in Their Cloud Solutions” by Robin Schumacher, Adam Ronthal, October 7, 2022).
CloudBolt’s approach to augmented FinOps advancements are focused on several distinct areas of differentiating capabilities. Inside the box here we find AI/ML-informed cost insights for additional observability, analysis, and actionability across ‘diverse personas’ (to understand cloud costs in relation to core performance, relative to transactional capability measures, in view of provisioning requirements and so on)... and we also find what the company likes to call full lifecycle FinOps for automated data-driven decision-making across all resource stages. A third cornerstone here (all shipped to continuously improve cloud ROI) takes the form of a unified control framework that converges public and private clouds into one cohesive cloud fabric with a unified access point and user experience.
Will FinOps equate to DevOps?
On the question of how, when and where FinOps might possibly gain the same level of IT industry recognition, adoption and further codification as we have seen in relation to disciplines like DevOps, SecOps and perhaps MLOps, CloudBolt CEO Hinkley is understandably upbeat.
“It’s really just a matter of time, but as organizations across all industries start to more directly operationalize their infrastructure layer, they will naturally recognize the need to apply a more proactive approach to cloud ROI analysis, management and orchestration as an inherent part of that process,” said Hinkley. “Yes, aspects like the formalization of job titles in this space will help, but even more important is the degree to which a business links its investment in cloud technology to business outcomes.”
The state of where we are with cloud cost management today is perhaps strange if we remind ourselves that, in so many cases, a business doesn’t buy its cloud estate based upon an initial value assessment. There can be many reasons for this happening in the real world, but Hinkley suggests that the pandemic didn’t help.
“Some companies lunged towards new cloud services as a means to survive during Covid, but in our post-pandemic world we can be rather more pragmatic. Now that hybrid cloud is the norm, we know that organizations will need to allocate workloads to different clouds for different reasons (not just cost, but also performance, speed, regional compliance and specific accelerations and augmentations such as analytics or transactional Input/Output etc.). Companies need a way to orchestrate via Augmented FinOps and move from ‘cloud first’ to ‘cloud right’ in every cloud instance,” said Hinkley.
That ‘cloud right’ tagline manifests itself in real functions such as the ability to use FinOps as a means of turning down an idle Virtual Machine (VM) based upon policy access controls that the CloudBolt platform itself enables. If we look at a brief history of time, value-based selling has always been the ethos that good salespeople have adopted and embraced, long before cloud and long before computers really.
FinOps personas
What we can think about now is how FinOps is experienced and viewed by ‘different personas’ inside a business. What that means is that FinOps to a CEO represents a validation of effective cloud spending, FinOps to business owners and domain specialists means cost-effective cloud procurement and operations that help improve the bottom line, FinOps to software engineers means effective clouds that work by virtue of intelligent procurement decisions that the IT team knows the business can underwrite and afford.
“While it might be impossible to make every persona and person happy on day 1, effectively applied FinOps can make every user and practitioner as content as possible based upon an initial assessment of what cloud computing resources should be adopted,” said Hinkley. “Moving immediately onwards from that point, we can work to continuously assess the state of deployments, recover more cost, and shift to maximizing value going forward. Of course, there is always a cost to move cloud workloads around - a cloud hyperscaler cost, or an internal cost in terms of staff time and resouces - so there will be a point of diminishing returns, but knowing that FinOps can increase agility to this point is the enabling factor here.”
If cloud computing has been through various hype-to-realization cycles in its brief history of time (first we missed security, then we got security - once we were told all clouds are good, then we realized hybrid is the way - initially we didn’t know where cloud even came from, now we know who the major three Cloud Service Provider (CSP) hyperscalers are)... then surely financial considerations related to cloud return on investment in the FinOps universe could be part of the next cloud epiphany.
