What this book covers
Chapter 1, Introduction to FinOps Principles, provides an introduction to what FinOps is and why it is needed for organizations that are transitioning to or already in the cloud.
Chapter 2, Understanding How FinOps Fits into Cloud Governance, covers how FinOps interacts with different methodologies widely used in organizations, such as the Well-Architected Framework, infrastructure as code, Agile project management, and other key processes, such as change management. This chapter also covers how FinOps can adapt to organizations in different phases of their cloud journey, and the basic tools to perform cost analysis on Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud, as well as other market tools that are offered by other vendors outside of Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.
Chapter 3, Designing and Executing the Tagging and Naming Convention Strategies, provides a detailed explanation of why both tagging and naming convention strategies are essential for FinOps practices, as well as recommendations and tools that can be used to design, implement, and enforce your own strategies.
Chapter 4, Estimating Cloud Solutions Costs and Initiative Savings, provides a detailed description of all the migration models that can be used to migrate workloads to the cloud, as well as some key concepts about cloud costs that should be understood before going forward. It also covers how to leverage pricing calculators and REST APIs offered by cloud providers to create your own estimations, as well as how potential savings concepts can boost and drive your FinOps practices further.
Chapter 5, Improving Cost Visibility with Dashboards and Reports, provides an introduction to cloud billing data and the structure and fields of a cloud bill, as well as what dashboards and reports are and how they are different from each other. It also includes a lot of insights to improve the quality of your FinOps dashboards and reports using financial concepts and other key ideas, such as unit economics.
Chapter 6, Implementing IaaS Compute Optimization, provides an overview of FinOps initiatives that can be carried out on infrastructure-as-a-service compute services for cost optimization.
Chapter 7, Implementing PaaS and Other Compute Optimization Initiatives, provides an overview of FinOps initiatives that can be carried out in platform-as-a-service compute services for cost optimization, as well as other initiatives that are related to backup, licensing, and resource management best practices.
Chapter 8, Implementing Database Optimization, provides an overview of FinOps initiatives that can be carried out in database services for cost optimization. It also introduces a lot of key basic concepts around databases in general that are needed to fully understand the tools at our disposal for optimizing database services.
Chapter 9, Implementing Storage Optimization, provides an overview of FinOps initiatives that can be carried out in database services for cost optimization. It also explains in depth how the different storage paradigms work and some key concepts, such as redundancy, data temperature tiering, and the cost drivers of storage services.
Chapter 10, Designing and Implementing FinOps KPIs, covers what a KPI is and the different categories of KPIs that exist. Once the basic concepts have been introduced, it also provides a complete methodology to design and develop your own KPIs, with a lot of examples of FinOps KPIs that can be used as a starting point to create your own dashboards and reports.
Chapter 11, Defining New FinOps Roles and Processes, provides an overview of how to define and implement your own FinOps operating model, which includes the functions, capabilities, processes, and roles and responsibilities that enable FinOps practices to be part of the organization’s DNA, as well as other key governance initiatives to enforce FinOps policies.
Chapter 12, Case Studies for Cost Optimization, presents two examples of real-life architectures to be optimized. In a step-by-step manner, we provide examples of different initiatives that we can use to optimize these solutions, analyzing throughout the process the impact on costs that these initiatives generate.
Chapter 13, Wrapping Up and Looking Ahead, provides a summary of sorts, where we reflect on what we’ve covered in this book and some challenges that FinOps practitioners may still be facing in the future. This chapter also covers two emergent fields of study that are on the rise, which are machine learning and sustainability, as well as the synergies to be found in each one with FinOps practices. To close the circle, this chapter also provides a self-assessment for you to evaluate what you have learned throughout this book.
