Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you're like most companies running large-scale, data-intensive workloads in the cloud, you’ve realized that you have significant quantities of waste in your environment. Smart organizations implement a host of FinOps and other activities to address this waste and the cost it incurs: … and the list goes on. These are infrastructure-level optimizations.

Many companies migrate to the cloud and overlook costs in favor of innovation, speed, and flexibility. They assume that the cloud is inherently more cost-effective than on-premises infrastructure. However, the organizations soon realize that the same characteristics that make the cloud such an enticing and flexible resource can also lead to unexpectedly higher usage bills than expected. The challenge is to find the right balance between optimal system performance, engineering velocity, and cost.

Finding trained financial planning and analysis (FP&A) professionals isn’t too much trouble for most companies. The tricky part is finding a candidate with the right technical and soft skills for your organization’s needs. The following interview questions will help you find a qualified FP&A professional for your company. Listen to their responses to gauge their reasoning, expertise, situational awareness, ambition, and individual attitude toward various aspects of the FP&A profession.

What is cloud cost monitoring? Cloud cost monitoring is a way to track and analyze expenses related to cloud services, such as data transfer, storage, and computing power. It includes monitoring resource allocation, usage, and billing data to optimize spend and ensure efficient utilization of your cloud resources.

It’s often said that Heroku is ideal for developers who prioritize rapid and straightforward application deployment. Meanwhile, AWS is seen as the ideal choice for applications requiring advanced scalability and intensive performance. Yet, as both platforms have evolved, their offerings have expanded, and some overlaps have emerged, making it more challenging to distinguish their strengths and limitations.

What is cloud cost management? Cloud cost management (CCM) is essential for organizations looking to harness the power of the cloud without succumbing to its potential financial pitfalls. With the shift towards cloud-based operations accelerating, the need to manage the associated costs has never been more critical. The scope of CCM is broad, covering several key areas such as cost visibility, budgeting, forecasting, cost optimization, and governance.

Things are changing. Technology differences between serverless and container-based systems are rapidly blurring. In 2020, Amazon Web Services (AWS) enabled AWS Lambda to package and deploy functions as container images instead of bundling all of a function’s code and dependencies in a.zip file. Today, more organizations are increasingly deploying Lambda functions as Docker container images. These companies want to reap the benefits of serverless computing, containers, and container orchestration.

YouTube. Netflix. Uber. Spotify. TikTok. You name it. You sign up and get your own account. Once you set it up however you want, you can access it from any internet-enabled device, including smartphones and smartwatches. If your device breaks, or is lost, or you switch to a new one, you can still access your account, as well as its settings and information, from another device without having to recreate everything from scratch.

In the simplest terms, FinOps is the joining together of finance and operations. Just like DevOps is the joining of development and operations. Both are partly tool-based and partly cultural. And both aim to fix problems that face technology or cloud-driven businesses. The goal of FinOps is to align cloud cost optimisation with the broader goals of the business by introducing transparency, accountability and clear reporting.