What is FinOps?
FinOps is the practice of bringing financial accountability to the variable spend model of cloud, enabling distributed teams to make business trade-offs between speed, cost, and quality. This section introduces the core cultural shift and foundational concepts needed to get started.
The FinOps Cultural Shift
FinOps is not just a team or a process; it's a cultural practice that involves collaboration between Engineering, Finance, and Business teams. Hover over each role to see its contribution.
Engineering
Finance
Business
Anatomy of a Cloud Bill
Understanding your cloud bill is the first step. Click on the components below to learn more about them.
📦 SKU (Stock Keeping Unit)
📊 Usage Metrics
🏷️ Tagging / Labeling
The FinOps Lifecycle
FinOps operates in a continuous, iterative cycle with three phases: Inform, Optimize, and Operate. This approach allows teams to constantly refine their cloud usage and spending. Select a phase to explore its goals and practices.
Inform Phase
The goal is to provide visibility into cloud spending. Teams need accurate and timely data to understand where money is going and who is responsible. This phase is about empowering teams with information to make intelligent decisions.
- Cost Allocation: Assigning costs to the correct teams or projects using tags.
- Benchmarking: Comparing spending patterns against internal goals or industry standards.
- Forecasting: Predicting future cloud spend based on historical data and planned changes.
Key Inform Metrics
Knowledge Check
Test your understanding of the core FinOps concepts covered in the guidebook. Select the best answer for each question and see how you score!
Quiz Complete!
Sample Projects
Apply your knowledge with these sample projects. These exercises are designed to simulate real-world FinOps challenges and help you build practical skills.
Cost Allocation Dashboard
Build a dashboard that visualizes cloud spend by team and project. Use sample data to show chargebacks and identify teams with the highest spend.
Orphaned Resource Cleanup Script
Write a script to identify and flag unused resources (like unattached storage volumes or idle VMs) for termination to reduce waste.
Unit Cost Analysis Report
Create a report that calculates a key unit economic metric (e.g., cost per active user). Analyze how this metric changes over time and identify drivers.