Culture, Teams and Adoption of FinOps

Nov 29, 2023

Gary Harmson, Principal Customer Engineer at Google, and Ieva Jonaityte, Technical Account Mgr at DoIT, discuss the challenges of communication between finance and engineering teams in optimizing cloud costs. They emphasize the importance of education, establishing a cloud center of excellence, and good tagging practices. They also talk about understanding cloud billing, the DIKW hierarchy, and the need for cost visibility and staying informed about new features.

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Introduction

00:00 • 2min

Pressure to justify cloud bills and introduction to Cloud Zero and FinOps

02:06 • 4min

Bridging the Language Barrier Between Finance and Engineering Teams for Cloud Spending

06:35 • 8min

Understanding Cloud Billing and Data Challenges

14:10 • 21min

Investing in Education and Making Informed Decisions

35:20 • 2min

Gary Harmson (Principal Customer Engineer @Google) and Ieva Jonaityte (Technical Account Mgr @DoIT) talk about the team dynamics, culture and training that drive FinOps success.

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SHOW NOTES:

DoIT Homepage
Simplifying FinOps for AI Workloads (Eps.719)
Leveraging FinOps to Scale a Startup (Eps. 761)
DIKW Pyramid - Framework for data classification

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show and back to the show. Gary, tell us about your background and what areas you focus on at Google Cloud these days.

Topic 2 - Let’s begin by talking about language, specifically the gaps in language (and understanding) between engineering teams and finance teams. What works today and where are the biggest gaps and challenges?

Topic 3 - One of the challenges of Cloud billing, and hence FinOps, is the 100s or 1000s or line-items. What are they for? How are they changing? What are some of the things/tools out there to make sense of all of this spend? (e.g. visualization, tagging, etc.)

Topic 4 - We’re all familiar with budgeting (pre-activity) and complaints about project/cost overruns (post-activity), but what are some of the things happening mid-project, or on-going to avoid the surprises or overruns?

Topic 5 - How much of these on-going changes/tracking is done by the engineering teams and how much is being done by finance teams?

Topic 6 - Can you share with us examples of how companies have evolved with good FinOps principles and hygiene in place?

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