Of late, my colleagues and I have been talking to a lot of clients who want to build a “FinOps team”, which they seem to hope will wave magic wands and reduce their cloud IaaS+PaaS bill. I’m struck by how many clients I talk to don’t have cloud cost problems that are reasonably solvable with FinOps. Bluntly: For many organizations, there is no reasonable ROI on FinOps (and certainly no sensible business case for building a FinOps team). This doesn’t mean that the organization shouldn’t manage their cloud finances. It just means that they don’t need to manage their cloud finances in a way that ..read more

Cloud customers are trying to make meaningful sustainability decisions. To really reduce carbon impact (or other types of environmental impact), they need the transparency to understand the impact of their architectural decisions. Just like they need to be able to estimate the cost of a solution, they need to be able to estimate its environmental impact. They need to be able to get an estimate of what the “environmental bill” will be based on the region (and maybe zone), services, and service options they choose. To the extent possible, they then need to see what impact they’re actually genera ..read more

It’s said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Well, in my opinion, the road to purgatory is paved with empty principles. It’s certainly common enough in cloud adoption. Day after day, clients show up with cloud strategies that say things like, “We will use the cloud to be more innovative” and “We will be vigilant about costs and use the lowest-cost solutions” and “We will maximize our availability and resilience” and “We will be safe and secure in the cloud” and “We’re not going to get locked into our vendors”. Some of these things are platitudes. Obviously, no one ever shows ..read more

I spend quite a bit of time talking to clients about developer self-service, largely in the context of public cloud governance and cloud operations. There are still lots of infrastructure and operations (I&O) executives who instinctively cringe at the notion of developer self-service, as if self-service would open formerly well-defended gates onto a pristine plain of well-controlled infrastructure, and allow a horde of unwashed orcs to overrun the concrete landscape in a veritable explosion of Lego structures, dot-matrix printouts, Snickers wrappers and lost whiteboard marker caps… never t ..read more

In the wake of AWS’s major US-East-1 incident of December 7th, 2021, I’ve fielded plenty of panicked client inquiry about whether anyone can trust any cloud provider, whether the availability zone model actually works, and whether or not the customer’s current architecture offers adequate resilience for their needs. I’ve also dealt with more than a handful of journalists who have wanted to push a narrative that AWS customers are fleeing in droves and/or are going multicloud as a result of that outage. Every story I’ve read on that subject has tried its darnedest to imply something which just i ..read more

This is the time of year when AR professionals ask analysts what they’re planning for next year. I don’t plan a year in advance. I tend not to even plan a quarter in advance. I write when the mood seizes me, which is probably unfortunate, but given that I write a lot it’s… okay-ish? But I have a bunch of things drafted (either fully or partially) and that should get released in Q1 of next year. I have a general goal of trying to ensure that I back the advice I write for cloud architects with something for the CIO and other executive leaders that provides a bottom-line strategic summa ..read more

Cloud budget overruns don’t have a singular cause. Instead, they come in a bright rainbow of jelly belly flavors (the Bertie Botts ones, especially, will combine into a non-mouthwatering delight). Each needs different forms of response. Ungoverned costs. This is the black licorice of FinOps problems. The organization has no idea what it’s spending, really, much less where the money is going, other than the big bills (or often, many little credit card bills) that they pay each month. This requires basic cost hygiene: analyze your cloud bills, get a cost management tool into place and make ..read more

One of the problems in doing “root cause analysis” within complex systems is that there’s almost never “one bad thing” that’s truly at the root of the problem, and talking about the incident as if there’s One True Root is probably not productive. It’s important to identify the full range of contributing factors, so that you can do something about those elements individually as well as de-risking the system as a whole. I recently heard someone talk about struggling to shift the language in their org around root cause, and it occurred to me that adapting Macneil’s Five P factors model ..read more

Of late, I’ve been talking to a lot of organizations that have learned cloud lessons the hard way — and even more organizations who are newer cloud adopters who seem absolutely determined to make the same mistakes. (Note: Those waving little cloud-repatriation flags shouldn’t be hopeful. Organizations are fixing their errors and moving on successfully with their cloud adoption.) If your leadership adopts the adage, “Move fast and break things!” then no one should be surprised when things break. If you don’t adequately manage your risks, sometimes things will break in spectacularly public ways ..read more

You shouldn’t relegate cloud cost governance, management and optimization to a dedicated FinOps team. Effective management of cloud economics requires cross-functional collaboration and the establishment of cloud economics as a pervasive cultural practice. Cloud economics is a practice that goes beyond cloud cost management. It is focused on maximizing the value of cloud computing to the business, rather than minimizing cloud expenses. For example, business leaders may reasonably make the decision to spend more to deliver a better user experience, or to ignore cost-related technical debt ..read more