FinOps X 2024: Top 3 Emerging Themes
FinOps X 2024
Last week, the Kubecost team joined FinOps leaders and practitioners at FinOps X 2024 organized by the FinOps Foundation. Although the conference was just in its third year, it became the stage for important product announcements by all three major cloud providers and featured keynotes from American Express and Disney. The common welcome for the more than 1000 FinOps professionals in attendance was “You’re Home”—a place where Finance and Engineering teams can come together to connect and learn about the state of cloud infrastructure costs. The FinOps community is now “Home” to over 22,000 members and growing by the minute.
Source: FinOps Foundation
Kubecost was at FinOps X to learn and meet with customers, and exchange information and ideas with our FinOps colleagues about the shared challenges and pains we’re working to solve at the intersection of cloud computing and finance operations. Kubecost also demonstrated powerful new capabilities from its recent Kubecost 2.3 release including an Efficiency Dashboard that shows cloud cost efficiency over time, enhanced Anomaly Detection, and 10X faster data ingestion. Our team took away three major themes this year, and an important observation.
1. Carbon Costs
Sustainability was hot this year (climate change pun not intended), and was discussed across the board, from the opening keynote to breakout sessions. This persona, passionate about GreenOps and reducing carbon emissions, was officially moved into the Allied Personas as a new stakeholder in the FinOps team, cementing sustainability in the charter of FinOps practice. The environmental impact of data centers and cloud consumption was top of mind, and ways to measure and monitor this on a granular level were a common discussion topic. Teams in breakout sessions explored the growing importance of sustainable practices and innovative technologies aimed at reducing energy consumption and the goal of achieving carbon neutrality in cloud operations while balancing this initiative against cloud cost management policies. Kubecost introduced Carbon Costs earlier this year empowering FinOps teams to allocate carbon costs tied to disk, node, and network assets based on their runtime.
2. Security
Security was also a highly discussed topic throughout the conference. The Security Persona was moved into the Allied category, signifying it as a leading consideration in FinOps operations. There is an increased emphasis on Security teams and FinOps practitioners working together to maintain strong security standards while providing insights into optimizing cloud security spending. The keynote from J.R Storment, Executive Director of the FinOps Foundation, discussed FinOps teams working alongside Security teams to perform anomaly investigations and incident response, policy and compliance investigations, and optimize identity and access management controls. Kubecost Enterprise provides robust SSO and RBAC capabilities to help teams enforce least privilege policies and minimize their attack surface through team roles and integration with the most popular identity providers including Okta, Auth0, and Microsoft.
3. “There Are No Runners”
The development of a FinOps practice is often framed as an iterative process. Organizations new to FinOps start by crawling, putting the minimum required practices and data collection in place. Organizations continue development by walking as they take on more FinOps rigor. Finally, teams reach maturity by running - where they become master practitioners of FinOps with high degrees of visibility, monitoring, and efficiency. Crawl, Walk, Run. The message for FinOps X 2024 was that There Are No Runners. Even the most mature FinOps practices still see room for vast improvement; changing technology and an emphasis on the different Allied Personas showed everyone in attendance that there is more we can all do to further the FinOps process. Whether it’s new ideas around sustainability and security or classic challenges around cloud spend efficiency, improvements can always be made to your FinOps practice.
One Important Observation
As our team returned home by car, train, and plane - one thing seemed to resonate with us all. This year it feels like FinOps has arrived. Gone are the discussions of whether a given company or cloud team should be starting a FinOps practice, they’ve been replaced by talk of how to institute FinOps quickly and correctly, which KPIs and tools to use, and how fast they can begin reaping the rewards, both financially and operationally, from adopting FinOps best practices. We can’t wait to see you at the next FinOps event!
Learn More
To help you take the next step in your FinOps journey, we invite you to join our upcoming webinar, “Cloud Cost Confusion? Decoding Expenses for Cross-Team Alignment.” On July 11, 2024, at 1pm ET (10am PT), Kubecost’s Finance Director Mike Macaluso and Senior Engineering Manager Cliff Colvin will share valuable insights on bridging the gap between finance and engineering teams. This one-hour session will explore practical strategies for fostering better communication, collaboration, and cost transparency in your organization. You’ll learn how to establish a shared language for discussing cloud costs, empower your teams with the right context, and leverage cost monitoring tools for real-time visibility. Register now for our webinar and take the next step towards mastering cloud cost management in your organization.