Cloud has given software engineers practically limitless access to resources — great for rapid, iterative development and innovation; perhaps not so great for controlling costs. Now, companies that have embraced cloud are learning that with the power it gives engineers comes great responsibility. Can the engineers handle it? 

Invariably, companies who adopt cloud eventually enter a “spend panic” and realize they’re spending more than they’d initially planned to, according to J.R. Storment (pictured, right), executive director of the FinOps Foundation.

“More importantly, they don’t really have the processes in place or the people or the tools to do things, like fully understand where their costs are going, to look at how to optimize those,” he said. 

Storment and Chris Aniszczyk (pictured, left), chief technology officer of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA event. They discussed their mission to bring cost-control tools and practices to cloud through FinOps. (* Disclosure below.)

Putting cloud cost-control resources together

Engineers have typically not been involved in their employers’ fiscal issues. But since cloud lets them spin up resources and services on demand — and those resources cost money — they’re suddenly accountable for IT spend. This is worrisome for companies with a team of voracious cloud-consuming engineers taking no account of costs.

“When I was at Twitter, we spun up services all the time with zero care about cost,” said Chris Aniszczyk (pictured, left), chief technology officer of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “And that’s happening at a lot of small companies now which don’t necessarily have as big a budget,” Aniszczyk added. 

The goal of FinOps, which stands for financial operations, is for engineers to have insight into cost almost at the very start of a build. Also, they ought to be able to make informed choices about ROI and hold meaningful conversations with business departments. And they should be able to do all of this agilely, without any slowing of the cloud native, DevOps style development cycle. 

FinOps Foundation founders eventually decided to do the smart thing one does with such a complex problem these days — open source it. The number of practitioners and companies seeking improved financial operations in cloud is growing, according to Aniszczyk, who points to Amazon Web Services’ recent introduction of a tool for resource quotas. The FinOps Foundation — which now has 3,000 members — provides a space for them to share their own tools, models, abstractions and practices. 

This mirrors the approach that has made the CNCF what it is today, according to Aniszczyk. “Once you start sharing these things, you end up with a dozen tools. Eventually, knowledge sharing, code sharing, specification sharing happens. And, eventually, things kind of become de facto tools and standards,” he said. 

Surprise: FinOps might mean spending more on cloud

There are two especially important points to understand about FinOps, according to Storment. One is that it’s at least as much about culture and practices as it is about technology. The foundation is trying to define a culture shift in which engineers and finance people understand each other better and communicate more smoothly toward the goal of making all-around better decisions.  

The other point is that FinOps, surprisingly, isn’t necessarily about saving money, but rather about getting more out of what’s spent.

“You actually end up spending more because you’re more comfortable with the efficiency that you’re getting, and your CIO is like, ‘Let’s move more workloads over. Let’s accelerate. Let’s do more in cloud. Let’s close out more data centers,'” Storment concluded, adding that this is why cloud providers are just fine with FinOps. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA event. (* Disclosure: Cloud Native Computing Foundation sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither CNCF nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE