To get the most out of this book

There are no specific requirements to follow along with this book. However, we have used certain conventions in the book, which we’ve explained as follows. Reviewing them will help you understand the content structure better.

Throughout this book, we will add some hints and important notes, for which we will use the following format:

Important note

This is a note, a comment, or an example.

When we dive deeper into the technical aspects of FinOps, we will include examples from all the major public clouds, which are currently the following:

• Microsoft Azure
• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Note also that in the last chapter of the book, you will find a self-assessment/knowledge check, which you can use to evaluate what you have learned throughout each chapter of the book.

Across the book, in the more technical chapters, you will find references to production, preproduction, and development environments. They are defined as follows:

• Production: In this environment, our services are published to final users or used in business processes. The services of this environment are live, so everything should work perfectly. In this environment, changes that may impact users or business are done out of hours or in maintenance windows that are previously set and agreed upon.
• Preproduction: Also called staging or User Acceptance Testing (UAT), this environment should be as similar as possible to production. This environment is where key users can test applications before they are promoted to production, and also where contingency tests are carried out.
• Development: Development environments are where the development processes take place. In this environment, data is usually fictional or consists of dummy data, and the resources are downsized to optimize the costs, as their computing needs are way lower. These environments are where new code is thoroughly tested by developers, to add new features or solve bugs.
• Sandbox: A sandbox environment is an environment which is usually isolated from the rest and whose purpose is to freely experiment with cloud services and software development. Company and security policies are usually not that strict in sandbox environment, and it is often used to conduct Proof of Concepts (PoCs) in a controlled environment.

The currency for all the cost references, estimations, and calculations used in the book is the American dollar ($).

Some other conventions we have used are:

Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: “From this point, let’s say we want to check the current pricing. We should use currentVersionUrl.”

When we show some examples of CLI commands to be used, the format used is as follows:

aws pricing describe-services --service-code AmazonEC2

A block of code is set as follows:

{
"companyname" : "imagineinc",
"businessunit" : "finance",
"city" : "madrid",
"region" : "spain"
}

Apart from these general notes, there are no requirements to navigate this book. A word of advice, though: Chapters 6 to 9 do get really technical, which may be challenging for readers coming from other non-cloud backgrounds.