- Building a FinOps Culture: Training and Education
- Creating an Effective AWS Cost Allocation Strategy
With organisations increasing their use of cloud platforms, managing cloud spend has become an increasingly pressing concern. Enter FinOps: Financial Operations. While many teams get excited about the technical sides of FinOps-tracking expenses and usage, it is far too often the cultural side that falls through the cracks. Ensuring a true FinOps culture means the inclusion of everyone within the organisation in the management of cloud costs. It’s about collaboration, openness, and fact-based decision making. It’s about breaking changing tack and break away from a siloed approach.
Tools Aren‘t Enough
There is no shortage of tools or best practices that support FinOps, but yet many organizations struggle with building a culture in which cost-awareness becomes second nature. In fact, the Amazon Web Services’ Well-Architected Framework touches upon financial management but does not go deep into how to build a mindset by which everyone feels responsible for keeping costs in check.
This post attempts to bridge that gap with some hands-on ways of creating a FinOps culture through training and education. When the teams are all on the same page, cloud cost management isn‘t just smooth, but becomes part of every work day.
What do I mean by being cost-aware?
Being cloud cost-aware means that the cloud costs are no longer afterthoughts, but a part of the decision-making process. And it‘s nolonger just the finance teams’ problem; everybody owns a piece of it. Well-established FinOps in companies means that all of their engineers consider the cost impact of their technical decisions, business teams know how their requests will affect budgets, and share some commonfeatures.
Organisations that focus only on technical tools but ignore the cultural side often find themselves struggling with cloud costs. Establishing a FinOps culture can help break down traditional silos by aligning finance, engineering, and operations teams around a shared objective. Organisations can leverage this culture to respond more easily to changing needs, optimise spending, and keep their cloud strategy sustainable.
People care about costs
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- Decisions about resources are facts-based
- Teams continuously seek to cut out waste
- Cost is included from the very start of any project
Why Culture Can Make or Break FinOps
Companies focusing only on tools and not on the cultural side tend toget stuck at roadblocks. A strong FinOps culture removes walls between teams, bridging the gaps between finance, engineering, and operations. It makes all these easier to adapt with, keep spending in control, and build a strategy for the cloud that stays over time.
For example, Atlassian refactored its cloud operations to bake in cost-awareness from the start; it helped increase collaboration among teams and positively impact the cost management culture. Companies that rely on tooling without following up with cultural activities commonly experience unclear ownership of budgets and spend management. Budgeting becomes siloed, and delivering repeatable and sustainable long-term results is difficult.
Common Challenges in Building a Cost-Aware Culture
Resistance to Change: One does build a FinOps culture overnight. Engineers fear that cost centric thinking will kill innovative ideas, and managers dislike an added transparency level to their organisation to protect budget allocations. This leads to the practice of shadow IT where teams continue on their old ways to avoid new tools that might make cost management easier.
Lack of Awareness and Training: Most teams don‘t realize how much training is required to get everybody up to speed. Engineers often do not understand the cloud pricing very well, while the finance teams may not get the technical details of the resources being proposed by the engineering teams. That leads to bad decisions and missed savings opportunities because misunderstandings without good training lead to bad decisions. The lack of proper training also means that very helpful tools are often under-utilised or ignored.
Team Silos: Most companies today have business and technology teams that don‘t work that well together. This makes it harder to bring FinOps practices to life. Finance may set budgets without knowing what the cost will be from the tech team side, while the engineering teams might focus only on the performance and forget the cost. To add to this, business units might make feature requests without understanding their financial implications. Silos can very quickly undo the best of FinOps plans unless teams begin speaking better.
Building the Foundation
Leadership Buy-In: Creating a FinOps culture has to start from the top. Getting buy-in from senior leaders gets these initiatives the push they need to succeed. This would include setting an example for oneself while making cloud cost management a priority. Spotify nailed this by providing clear data visibility and working to hammer in the point that cost management wasn‘t just for finance, it was a company-wide effort.
Identify and amplify a cadre of FinOps champions across groups. These champions help bridge the gap between tech and finance teams in the pursuit of making cost-awareness habitual. A great example is Pinterest, where champions drive cost reviews, promote good practices, and spark trade-off discussions around cost. In this way, cost management stays top of mind.
Clearly Defined Goals and Benefits: Communication is the key here. The teams need to understand the drivers behind adopting FinOps. Is the goal to reduce unnecessary spending? Better leverage the resources being consumed? Or make data driven informed decisions around application lifecycle management? Airbnb does a good job here in highlighting cost visibility and keeping the teams updated with frequent check-ins. When people understand the “why,” they are less likely to resist the change.
Training and Education Strategies
Tailored Training. Not all people need the same kind of training. Engineers need to know how cloud pricing works and learn ways to build cost-efficient but resilient systems. The Finance teams need to understand cloud cost structures, while leadership needs to understand the big-picture view of how FinOps fits into the overall strategy. Courses such as AWS Cloud Financial Management targeted towards the Engineering and Finance teams, and FinOps Foundation’s FinOps Certified Practitioner for Executives can work to bridge these gaps.
Hands-on Learning: People actually learn when they get down on their hands and knees. Workshops in simulated balanced cost and performance models, hackathons, or other style sessions bring theteams closer to understanding what actually is the cost of managing. A session on how to use tools like AWS Cost Explorer, or deploying Cloud Intelligence Dashboards makes cost awareness more real and actionable.
Commitment to Continuous Learning: Cloud environments change quickly, and cost structures evolve with them. A continuous learning approach helps keep teams updated on the latest FinOps practices and tools. Monthly webinars, internal newsletters, and platforms like AWS Skill Builder and A Cloud Guru provide regular learning opportunities. A mentorship program where FinOps champions offer guidance can also help teams stay proactive about cost management.
Making It Happen
Create a Roadmap. Start with an assessment of the current cost management activities and where they may be weak. Clearly definewhat those outcomes look like: “reduce cloud spend by 15%,” for example, or “improve budget forecasting by 20%. Create an assess, plan, act, and review plan so that teams have something to work towards and measure progress.
Bake cost steps into workflows: As you create these workflows, include cost checks. Just as embedding a “performance check“ prior to deployment of a new feature can make performance-awareness feel as natural as checking for cost awareness for finance, adding forecasts of costs to budgeting cycles makes allocations more accurate.
Use the Right Tools: Ensure teams know how to use tools to help control costs, including AWS Cost Explorer, Trusted Advisor and the CUDOS Dashboards. These help track spending and identify where savings can occur. AWS Budgets and third-party tools, like CloudHealth, CloudCheckr etc. can provide more detail into the costs. Tools like AWS QuickSight can use the built dashboard, which may help them understand cost data from multiple angles. Educating teams on how and what these dashboards mean leads to smarter decision-making.
Fostering Collaboration
Bring Finance and Tech Together: Regular meetings around cost reviews keep finance and engineering teams on the same page. AWS Cost Explorer or CUDOS Dashboards can make such discussions focused while preparing reports in those kinds of meetings.
Establishing feedback loops: Monthly or quarterly reviews can keep teams aligned and open the way for tweaks in practices based on real data. The regular input provided by tools like AWS CUDOS may enable just such discussions.
Ownership is shared among teams: For example, cost-related KPIs can be divided out: “average cost per workload“ to engineering, while finance focuses on “budget variance“. The Business teams on the other hand can focus on “cost per transaction” or “cost per unit of revenue” to ensure that the systems meet business metrics. That way, everybody’s hands will be in the pot regarding cost management.
Tracking Success and Growth
Defining Key Metrics: Define what matters: To understand whether your FinOps culture is working, it is important to track metrics that tell a story-such as cost per user or budget accuracy. For example being able to track things like Cost per User, Resource Utilisation Efficiency, and Budget Variance to see financial progress is key. Fortunately, with AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Budgets, this is not as hard to do.
Embrace Growth and Success: Cloud adoption isn‘t static, so FinOps practices shouldn’t be either. Quarterly review periods can be great times to determine when it is time to refresh training or extend FinOps principles to other departments. A good example is how Adobe scaled its FinOps approach by adopting it into more and more teams as their cloud consumption increased..
Celebrate Wins: When the teams reach cost-saving milestones, recognise it. Spotify, for instance, holds sessions of “show-and-tell” where the teams share what worked. This fosters more sharing to reinforce a culture of cost management.
Beyond the tools: Building FinOps culture speaks to people and shared goals. Investing in training, improving teamwork and spreading responsibility can make cost-awareness the fabric of how companieswork. Companies like Spotify, Pinterest and Adobe prove by taking a strong approach to FinOps, cloud cost management can become second nature and deliver real result
Now, here’s something for you: get started by training, communicate openly, and iteratively refinethe process. Soon, you‘ll have a cost-conscious behavior that aligns with your cloud and business objectives.