Welcome to the FinOps.directory – Cloud Cost Management Best Practices and Vendor Solutions Directory

As they describe in this blog the Home Office has applied a sequence of best practices to reduce their Cloud cost expenses by 40%.

These best practices are known as ‘FinOps’. As the FinOps Foundation explains, this combines DevOps with Financial Operations, so that organizations can gain more spending control and predictability.

The volume to manage is vast. VentureBeat reported that Cloud spending will outstrip traditional IT by 2025, the total amount being a whopping $1.8 trillion. Naturally enterprises will want to optimize that expense as much as possible and that’s where FinOps comes in.

Each service provider offers specific tools and practices. AWS offers their Cloud Financial Management Services, introduced in this Beginners Guide and explained in detail in this presentation and this best practices guide. Similarly Microsoft has their Azure Cost Management services, introduced in this video.

There are also numerous vendors specializing in the field, such as CloudZero, who offer this helpful blog listing the 11 Best Cloud Cost Management Tools., which of course lists their own as well as Amazon CloudWatch, Azure Cost Management, Densify, Virtana Optimize, Harness, Cloudability, Flexera, VMware CloudHealth and CloudCheckr.

Even with this plethora of tools the challenge of successfully managing Cloud costs is daunting. Jacob Ben-David expertly details the complexity of the process in this excellent Linkedin blog, highlighting the limitations FinOps programs and tools often experience, and walking through the types of technicalities needing addressed.

These difficulties as the enterprise Cloud footprint expands, notably in ‘multi-cloud’ scenarios. As VentureBeat writes the provisioning of services across multiple Cloud providers makes the observability required for FinOps increasingly more challenging.

FinOps – Cloud Cost Management Best Practices.

FinOps vendors include @Densify, @VirtanaCorp, @harnessio, @Apptio, @cloudcheckr, @flexera.