Cloud Data: FinOps Is the Crucial Ops

This article rounds off the series of posts to better understand how the pitfalls around the collection, maintenance, and storage of your cloud data can mean the difference between failure and success within your cloud strategy.  The concepts in this series stem from brainstorming with my good friend Roel Hodzelmans and are additionally inspired by reactions from the audience to a talk given previously in Dublin, Ireland.

The first article in this series, "Cloud Data: Understanding 3 Common Pitfalls," provided an introduction to cloud and data and what that means in a cloud-native architecture beyond just storage. The second article in this series, "Cloud Data: Observability Is the Forgotten Data," discussed the forgotten data that is often overlooked when planning for cloud-native solutions. This third and final article explores a new operations role that is going to be the most crucial one in your organization.

FinOps Is the Crucial Ops

Many of us are re-architecting our applications and development processes to be cloud-native, our operations to be platform providers, and building a site reliability engineer (SRE) organization to close the feedback loop between the platform consumers and providers. We talk (hopefully) about data portability, exit strategies, and baselines. We talk about security and we talk about utilization.

The only thing that often gets overlooked is who owns the decisions being made around observability, data, and cloud providers. Naturally, the end responsibility lies with the CIO, or so you might think; but often at the lower levels, we're seeing developers, DevOps, architects, and others making decisions that have serious cost implications.

In the previous article, you saw that observability data growth is out of control. Let's look at this quote shared here to refresh your memory:

It's remarkable how common this situation is, where an organization is paying more for their observability data (typically metrics, logs, traces, and sometimes events) than they do for their production infrastructure.

Recently IDC (2022) published a cloud report in which they shared an amazing revelation showing that companies are taking this problem seriously.

"By 2023, 80% of organizations using cloud services will establish a dedicated FinOps (financial operations) function to automate policy-driven observability and optimization of cloud resources to maximize value."

The action being taken is almost universal and is meant to resolve the cost issues by putting a financial owner in place to manage the decisions and processes in your organization.

This is a very important data point in this discussion and is almost historic with the speed at which this decision has been reached by a majority of organizations. "You can’t ignore this problem." That’s the message they are sending. It is time to take action - and decisive action - by installing a single point of responsibility to corral the explosion of decisions impacting the costs of doing business in a cloud-native world.

Cloud Data Pitfalls

The three pitfalls addressed in this series covered cloud and data: not just the storage issues, but how observability data is often ignored in cloud-native solutions. Finally, the role of FinOps is going to appear in your cloud-native world in the very near future to address the ownership and process management to gain control of cloud-native observability and data issues.

This series presents an overview of the original session presented live in Dublin and, hopefully, it has been able to share an awareness of the pitfalls that might be in your path regarding cloud-native solutions and your data growth as a result. 

Watch the full video of the presentation below.