FinOps: A Google Cloud 2023 Perspective

Cloud FinOps brings financial accountability and visibility while supporting business value realization and innovation through cloud transformation. FinOps primarily champions optimizing an organization’s cloud usage and cost efficiency through an operational framework. This FinOps framework is established through IT, Finance, and business domains. The framework includes

• mechanism to identify intricate dependencies of existing IT systems practices that drive overspending
• metrics to track improvement in spending
• building blocks to move the metrics in the right direction

This article provides an introduction to the framework and how one would achieve that through Google Cloud. My gut feeling says doing it through other clouds is not going to be very different, I am happy to be proven wrong.

The FinOps Framework

What Drives Overspending

Overspending is a cultural problem stemming from a group. The group can be

• Individuals carrying out IT tasks
• a team delivering an IT product and/or using IT products
• a set of teams contributing to a portfolio of IT products
• a department with several sets of teams and a group of people as above

Also, managing overspending requires the following steps:

1. planning, budgeting, and…