Motivation
As cloud adoption increases, so does the complexity of managing costs. As with any organization, we constantly face challenges related to optimizing and mitigating the risks of cloud spend. With the risk of cloud costs spiralling, it became clear that a more structured approach is needed. Enter FinOps — short for Financial Operations. It’s a discipline that focuses on maximizing business value from cloud spend, allowing companies to make more informed financial decisions around cloud usage.
My motivation for diving into FinOps stemmed from the need to get a better handle on cloud expenses and ensure we’re driving business value from every pound spent. The goal? To better understand how to control these costs and adopt a data-driven approach to cloud management.
Training
The FinOps training I attended spanned two days, and it was eye-opening to see everything organized in one place. The content covered a wide range of topics that are pivotal to mastering cloud cost management. It was particularly insightful to go through the official FinOps framework, which is the backbone of this discipline.
What is the FinOps Framework?
The FinOps framework is a set of best practices and guidelines designed to help businesses manage their cloud costs in a collaborative way across different departments, such as engineering, finance, and product management. It focuses on three key phases:
Inform: Giving teams visibility into their cloud spend through detailed reporting and analytics.
Optimize: Continuously identifying opportunities to cut costs and make cloud usage more efficient.
Operate: Ensuring that cloud usage aligns with business goals and that decisions are being made with a cost-benefit mindset.
Going through the framework during the training really highlighted the importance of cross-functional collaboration and the need to make cost efficiency a shared responsibility across teams.
Exam
The FinOps certification exam consisted of 50 multiple-choice questions and was non-proctored. There is a pass rate of 75% and only an hour to complete. While I managed to pass with 80%, in hindsight, I should have slowed down a bit to ensure a more thorough review of each question. Unfortunately, the exam doesn’t provide feedback on the specific questions you got wrong, which makes it harder to improve on specific areas.
In my preparation, I struggled to find quality mock exams, which would have been useful in understanding the exam format better. However, they do offer three retries for the exam, so you can essentially use these attempts to train and improve if needed. This really does mitigate any anxiety about trying the exam, so my advice would be to try as soon as training is over and see.
Conclusion
Overall, I found the FinOps course to be highly beneficial and a great addition to my CV. The principles I’ve learned will be incredibly useful in my role as we seek to optimize our cloud spend and drive more value from our cloud investments. Going forward, I’m excited to put this knowledge into action and start utilizing FinOps practices to create more efficient and cost-effective cloud strategies.
Given the value I’ve gained from this certification, I’m already considering further exams in this series, including the Certified FinOps Professional. Continuing down this path seems like a priority for anyone serious about cloud cost management.