I kind of agree that I don't love the term. That being said it has become the de-facto way that people refer to the space and practice. The FinOps Foundation hyped up the term and space quite a bit which they deserve credit for but do wish there was a better name :)
How would you manage your cloud costs if you ran a company of, say, 4,000 engineers? Balancing the needs of delivery teams to build their technology with the needs of the business to manage costs. Do you think every single team should directly report their cloud costs to the CFO? Or at that scale does it make more sense to report costs to another individual? And when that needs to scale, maybe we give that individual a team?
The game here is defining parts of the job away to be someone else's job or responsibility.
FinOps isn't a dedicated job but something a cloud engineer can do as part of its job. In the same way that DevOps doesn't need to be a dedicated function itself.
And as for the cloud... Yes that turned out to be a whole lot expensive for companies than predicted - and you share compute with anyone so that dualcore CPU isn't always that fast. But cloud is also flexible and that is where FinOps comes in.
somehow i misread that as "massage your cloud costs", and it.. sticks..
If it’s not got a familiar marketing thing going on, they’ll refuse to acknowledge it even if their devs are practically begging for it.
At this point I'm waiting for someone to start flogging "CodeOps".
Later, FinOps role can evolve but expectations will mostly be reactive.
We recently switched from Grafana to Prometheus. Reason being that a license refresh took longer to process on their end. What happens when a license expires on Grafana? They fucking shut down all your shit cold turkey. Don't care if you're in prod or have a dedicated guy on their end for support or whatever. So you're happily churning along and then suddenly you're blind. Nice FinOps. With Prometheus there's a grace period where they'll happily overcharge you. But we've never had a product absurdly blow up on us like this before. It's truly mind boggling that they're out here talking about 'FinOps' now.
Nothing to do with YC AFAIK.
Datadog is expensive, but at least we were only making these decisions for the ~hundreds of custom business metrics, and not the ~tens of thousands of metrics from our infrastructure.
In my previous company I had a good setup for costs monitoring - including release to release comparisons, drill downs, statistics, etc.
After each release I looked at this data. It saved a lot of $, by simple fixes like "why we are calling this API twice?".
It also quite some issues that weren't strictly customer related, but weren't apparent from other type of data (you will always have some "unknown unknowns" in your monitoring, and costs data seem to be pretty wide net to catch some of those)
