Last week our CEO Davorin, CloudVane Solution Architect Irena and I skipped across the pond to glorious Austin, Texas, to attend the first ever in person FinOps conference, FinOpsX. We had the chance to exchange experiences on cloud cost management and optimization, see best practices applied in real-life cases and get inspired. In this blog, I will tell you what happened at the event, what are the lessons learned and what are the next steps. 

Before we get into it, let me share a bit of our history with FinOps. We first came across the methodology in 2019 during CloudyCon in San Francisco, where me and my colleagues caught the FinOps bug. Soon after, Neos (the parent company of CloudVane) became one of the first 6 FinOps Certified Service providers. A half dozen of colleagues and I became Certified FinOps practitioners in early 2020.

In the past two years, we ingrained CloudVane with FinOps principles and best practices, and in 2022, CloudVane was awarded the status of FinOps certified platform.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s continue with the story of FinOpsX.

For two days, hundreds of FinOps practitioners had the opportunity to enrich connections, gain professional advancement and get inspired regardless of their FinOps maturity. They were encouraged to collaborate, share information, solve problems and gain knowledge, all with the goal to further their FinOps practice.

Attendees were a mixed bunch of engineers, finance people, architects and anyone else who participates in managing the value of Cloud.

FinOpsX was packed with content. There were 6 keynotes by frontrunners in the field of cloud cost management, 33 breakout sessions, 18 lightning talks and 12 chalk talks. All content was of the highest quality, curated by the FinOps community itself.

Even though any topic in FinOps can be regarded as a hot topic, here are just a few messages from FinOpsX that really stand out and make you think.

The number 1 issue in FinOps, as stated at one of the chalk talks, is to get engineers to take action. Get the culture right, enable better communication between teams, and empower and educate engineers. That is the FinOps path.

Keynotes speakers brought interesting insights to the audience. J.R. Storment, one of the authors of the FinOps “manual”, the book Cloud FinOps: Collaborative, Real-Time Cloud Financial Management, stated that 80% of enterprises will have FinOps professionals in their organisations this year as public cloud spending skyrockets. Furthermore, he shares that Cloud spending is forecasted to eclipse the GDP of Canada by 2025.

The FinOps Foundation members are always pushing to harness as much knowledge they can from this active community of practitioners. Their efforts were crowned by the release of The State of FinOps 2022 report during FinOpsX.

As stated at the very beginning of the report, it shows that “while there are many fundamentals of FinOps to grow and master, there’s no single path to take. It’s a journey of many intersecting ones filled with other travelers.”

The report brings facts and figures on:

• FinOps roles
• FinOps teams and culture
• FinOps adoption
• Key FinOps challenges
• Best practices

Take some time and read the entire  State of FinOps 2022. If you have any questions after you have read it, I will be happy to discuss – drop us a line or join the conversation on LinkedIN.

One of the most important and interesting topics for our team was Open Billing. Following the event, we will be joining the Open billing working group focused on establishing a shareable cross-cloud vocabulary for key cost & usage dimensions/metrics that maps service names, billing file/API dimensions and metrics to a common cloud agnostic FinOps centric baseline.

Above it all, us three FinOps practitioners found it both satisfying and inspiring to spend two days surrounded by likeminded FinOps enthusiasts, sharing experiences, acquiring knowledge and soaking in ideas that we will bring home and pour into CloudVane.

If you find yourself nursing a spark for Cloud cost management and FinOps, do get in touch. We would be happy to guide you on your FinOps journey.