FinOps, meaning the practice of managing cloud costs, has been around for years. Yet it continues to evolve in response to emerging challenges in the realm of cloud spending.

If you want to stay at the forefront of cloud cost management best practices, you need to embrace up-and-coming FinOps trends. Let’s take a look at those trends by discussing new challenges that businesses are facing in the realm of cost management, as well as the novel FinOps solutions they are embracing to solve them.

1. AI’s impact on cloud costs

Let’s start with what might be an obvious cloud cost management trend: the impact of artificial intelligence.

In a fundamental respect, cloud-based AI workloads don’t require different infrastructure from other workloads. But they do require an especially high capacity of compute resources, and the ways in which they use those resources may vary. For example, AI model training is a compute-intensive but non-continuous activity, making it different from other compute-heavy workloads that operate without interruption.

At the same time, AI-centric cloud services are bringing businesses into uncharted territory when it comes to pricing. For example, services such as Amazon Bedrock are priced based on token consumption, a new approach to pricing and buying that requires novel strategies for cost tracking and forecasting.

Both of these changes mean that AI workloads place new pressures on businesses in the realm of FinOps. Organizations need not just the ability to track cloud spending related to AI in new ways, but also to measure KPIs that help them assess whether their AI cloud infrastructure is cost-optimized.

2. FinOps for containerized workloads

Containers, the technology that runs applications in lightweight virtual environments, are another trend that have reshaped the way many organizations use the cloud, and that requires a different approach from a FinOps perspective.

To deploy containers cost-effectively, assessing basic cloud infrastructure metrics such as total processor or memory costs is not enough. You need granular visibility that allows you to track spending on a per-container, per-pod and per-cluster basis.

Here again, this is not something that traditional FinOps strategies were designed to accommodate because they didn’t focus on containers. But expect this type of cost management capability to become central to FinOps conversations in 2024 and beyond.

3. Granular cost reporting for shared cloud services

Traditionally, FinOps was good at telling you how much you were spending in total for a given Cloud Service Provider tool or service, such as object storage or cloud servers. But if multiple business units or workloads share the same service, knowing the overall cost of the service is not very helpful for optimizing spending. One workload could be consuming more cloud resources than it requires, for instance, while another workload is underprovisioned.

For this reason, a FinOps trend I’m noticing in the industry today is increased investment on solutions that provide granular cost reporting data across shared cloud services. With these tools, businesses can manage cloud spending on a department-by-department and workload-by-workload basis, rather than settling for the blunter approach of managing spending at the cloud service level.

4. Data analytics costs

The typical business has invested heavily in tools and services for analyzing data. And increasingly, businesses are realizing that there is often a heavy cost associated with data analytics. You have to pay not just for the tools themselves, but also for the compute, storage and networking infrastructure that allows you to move and process data.

To keep these costs in check, FinOps strategies are now starting to extend to data analytics. Businesses are keen to make sure they have selected the most cost-effective analytics tools and built a data architecture that allows them to move and analyze information without wasting money.

This is yet another example of a corner of the FinOps ecosystem where traditional tools and metrics don’t suffice, and where the industry needs to build out novel solutions tailored to the unique cost management challenges of data analytics.

5. Bringing FinOps to the network level

Spending insights related to cloud networking, too, have become a trendy facet of FinOps

In the past, FinOps strategies tended to focus on reining in overprovisioned compute and storage resources – which made sense because these types of resources often contributed the most to cloud budget bloat. FinOps didn’t specifically ignore cloud networking costs, but it tended not to make them a key focus.

But today, businesses are realizing that cloud networking egress fees, which cloud providers charge whenever data moves out of their clouds, can make a large dent in their budgets, too. They’re seeking insights that help them understand whether their network data transfer costs are justifiable based on the business value they deliver, and how changes in network architecture could reduce those costs without impacting workload performance.

6. Robust cloud forecasting capabilities

FinOps has always entailed some cost forecasting abilities. But today, I’m seeing additional pressure on businesses to embrace advanced spending forecasts that allow them to take proactive steps for getting ahead of unnecessary spending.

To this end, improving the forecasting capabilities of FinOps teams and tools has become a key trend. Businesses are looking for solutions that allow them to understand how different cloud configurations and varying levels of demand will impact their spending, then make informed decisions about how best to optimize spending while simultaneously pursuing business goals.

7. Expansion of FinOps teams

A quick search on job boards will clue you into the fact that FinOps hiring has become trendy. In the past, businesses often attempted to add cloud cost management to the job responsibilities of people in other roles, like engineering. But now, they’re increasingly hiring dedicated FinOps staff – a smart move, given that FinOps requires a unique blend of cloud computing and finance skills.

The shortage of people with those special skills will likely make FinOps hiring a challenge. Nonetheless, it’s clear that we’re trending toward a world where businesses make FinOps a more deliberate and focused priority, and where their hiring decisions reflect that goal.

Conclusion

If there’s one overarching trend at play in the FinOps space today, it’s that businesses are looking for more comprehensive cloud cost management solutions that serve a variety of stakeholders. Gone are the days when rightsizing cloud servers was the be-all, end-all of cloud cost management, and when executives were barely aware of cloud spending trends.

Now is the time to get ahead of these emerging FinOps challenges by assessing your organization cost management capabilities across the areas described above. Do you have the right people, tools and expertise to tackle emerging cloud spending challenges? If not, invest in them now, before you find your cloud bills bloated by novel trends.

Willy Sennott is the executive vice president of FinOps at Vega Cloud. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE.

Image: Pixabay