Five key takeaways from the FinOps Foundation London Roadshow

On the 28th of March, we attended the FinOps Foundations London Roadshow. This was the first face-to-face event that the FinOps Foundation has ever organized. On top of this, it was also the first in-person gathering in a few years for many of the people who attended, which added to the feel of this intimate event. 

There were many things shared with us, including not yet released data and UK/EU specific scopes of the data around FinOps challenges, teams, benchmarking, salaries, and more.

Our CTO Jon Thompson shares some of his observations and key takeaways:

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(1) The growing interest of the financial industry in cloud and FinOps

 It was great to see a lot of representation from City of London Financial Services firms present at the event. As someone who spent the first 20 years of my career in companies like Goldman Sachs, it’s interesting to hear how the use of the Cloud is catching up with some other industries, and the major firms are starting to be significant contributors to FinOps thought leadership.

(2) The new focus of the FinOps Foundation on sustainability

 There was much interest in the new Sustainability pillar. Driving sustainability has a big overlap with FinOps, and for many organizations, it could be an additional source of funding and sponsorship for programs.

(3) The new FinOps maturity framework

 The FinOps Foundation announced a new simpler framework for assessing the FinOps maturity of an organization, based on the idea of 5 “lenses”. This announcement was coupled with the fact that the assessment tool will be open source.

(4) The State of the FinOps 2022 survey findings

 The FinOps Foundation shared some thought-provoking slices through the recent survey results data. One that caught my attention was the size of cloud spend vs. current, and 12m projected FinOps team sizes. There will be a lot of growth in the area in the next year, with a limited pool of experienced people. Organizations will need to be creative in how they resource their programs.

(5) The limitation of vendor tools

 In one of the discussions on stage and in some 1-on-1 chats I had, some of the more mature organizations are hitting the limits of what standard tools can currently provide. Some are resorting to building their own tools to meet their needs. This struck a chord with me, as we’ve repeatedly seen programs stall after the initial low-hanging fruit has been cleaned up. We’ve helped these clients progress by drilling into the next level of detail: going beyond an EC2 instance as a black box and understanding its use and what’s running on it. This takes you from a theoretical rightsizing to an achievable optimization in the real world.

Conclusion

There will be a lot of growth in FinOps in the next twelve months and projections of more spending. This will lead to resourcing issues and companies pushing the boundaries of what is possible on the tooling they have available. 

Thank you to the FinOps Foundation team for a great event, and we hope to see you at future FinOps roadshow events. 

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