- Created by Bob Flynn, last modified on Jan 27, 2025
What's this event all about?
FinOps
There are many skills that go into successful use of hyper-scale technologies. While most are technical, some are decidedly cultural. As stated by the FinOps Foundation's Technical Advisory Board, "FinOps is an operational framework and cultural practice which maximizes the business value of cloud, enables timely data-driven decision making, and creates financial accountability through collaboration between engineering, finance, and business teams."
The key concept in that definition is collaboration, collaboration beyond the technical teams to a variety of stakeholders who all conspire to make the most efficient and cost-effective use of the cloud.
Why this? Why now?
While FinOps has been around for years and attempts have been made by practitioners in the research & education cloud community to preach its importance, there is still more work to be done to make FinOps practices a consideration in all work done in the cloud. A few community members got together and talked about putting together a dedicated event to share what they are doing to start putting FinOps practices into place to show their peers how accessible it could be. Along the way the organizers decided to pull in some other experts from the vendor space. (Never fear, no sales here. Just knowledge sharing.)
Schedule
Approximate Start Time (EST) | Title | Speaker | Description |
---|---|---|---|
The Basics | |||
1:00 pm | Welcome | Bob Flynn, I2 | |
1:10 pm | What is FinOps? | Stephanie Padilla, Unisys | FinOps is the practice of bringing a financial accountability cultural change to the variable spend model of cloud. We will review the FinOps framework – maximizing the business value of cloud - and lay the groundwork for our discussions today. |
1:20 pm | How to get institutional buy-in | Vince Kellen, UCSD | |
Understanding cloud cost and usage | |||
1:30 pm | Ingestion + Allocation = Enlightenment | Jonathan White, UCF | This session will begin with some lessons learned if you're beginning your tagging journey and explain why tagging is critical to the success of your FinOps practice. We'll also share several visuals created using our 3rd-party cloud cost management tool, IBM Apptio Cloudability, and highlight how we use this data to advise our FinOps stakeholders and drive conversations within the institution. |
1:40 pm | FOCUS Overview and Why it Matters | Tatum Tummins, Kion | Attendees will learn about the cloud billing standardization effort, FOCUS, and hear about what value they can expect from it. |
1:50 pm | Q & A | ||
Quantify business value | |||
2:00pm | Break | ||
2:10pm | Building a Culture of Cloud Cost Awareness | Kari Robertson, UCOP | Establishing a culture of cloud cost awareness requires promoting collaboration, transparency, and accountability throughout your organization to ensure cloud resources are utilized efficiently, align with business objectives, and comply with security standards. |
2:20 pm | Q & A | ||
Optimize cloud usage and cost | |||
2:30 pm | Cloud Elevation Index | Gabe Geise, PSU | The Cloud Elevation Index is an innovative approach to calculate value from cloud service usage. It adds context to cloud spending and insight into the maturity and efficiency of your cloud architecture. |
2:40 pm | Savings at Scale | James Smith, Strategic Blue | |
2:50pm | Effective utilization of cloud pricing models | Gotthard Szabo, TD SYNNEX | Learn the fundamentals of AWS pricing models, including PPAs, on-demand cost, reserved instances, and savings plans. |
3:00 pm | Scaling the Cloud for Savings | Jenn Wheeler, W&M | Like many universities, William & Mary runs a variety of non-production instances of our enterprise applications and the ecosystems of homegrown software that's built up around them. Thanks to the elasticity of compute in the cloud, we're able to make use of a number of tools and strategies to scale down those non-production instances to save money and to scale up in response to various needs. In this session we'll describe and demo some of the most commonly used approaches we've adopted, including Keda, Traefik plugins, and message queues. |
3:10 pm | Q & A | ||
3:20 pm | Break | ||
Managing the FinOps Practice | |||
3:40 pm | Centralizing the request process | Emma Levett, Patrick Sullivan, MIT | IS&T has created a centralized process, supported by a portal, for the MIT community to request accounts for AWS, GCP and Azure. This session will talk to how that centralization is allowing for charge backs, and data to support parts of the FinOps process. |
3:50 pm | Navigating Complexity in Cloud Cost Recovery | Chris Manly, Cornell | Given the inherent complexity of cloud billing and savings programs, what approaches to rebilling can cover the costs while maximizing savings for the institution? What does it take to present that strategy in a transparent way to users? Come hear the story of Cornell’s journey through this process. |
4:00 pm | Everyone's responsibility to manage the cloud spend | Natalie Bodine, CSU | Cloud cost management is no longer solely an IT responsibility – it’s a collective effort that demands collaboration across all teams. Through FinOps practices, Finance acts as the storyteller, turning complex cost data into actionable insights that drive accountability and strategic alignment. Discover how the CSU embraced FinOps as a shared responsibility and see a demo of how we are leveraging Amazon Quicksight to promote transparency, clarity, and informed decision-making across the CSU. |
4:10 pm | FinOps is CloudOps | Tatum Tummins, Kion | FinOps is ultimately about maximizing the value of your cloud investment, and there are a lot of aspects to operating in the cloud that can be improved. This session will talk about why FinOps is ultimately the responsibility of all teams and involves more than just managing spend. |
4:20 pm | Q & A | ||
Next Steps | |||
4:30 pm | FinOps Assessment Tools Walkthrough | Jonathan White, UCF | Measure and track your FinOps maturity over time with the official FinOps Assessment spreadsheet or, for something simpler, consider the Microsoft FinOps Review. |
4:40 pm | How to get involved with the R&E FinOps community | Rob Martin, FinOps Foundation | Get connected with the global FinOps community, advance your career, and share best practices through FinOps Foundation programs. Opportunities to connect with others within Public Sector and with FinOps leaders around the world are available every week for you to join. |
4:50 pm | Resources and Wrap |
Organizing Committee
- Natalie Bodine, California State Unviersity
- Bob Flynn, Internet2
- Oscar Fuentes, Stanford University
- Gabe Geise, Penn State University
- Emma Levett, MIT
- Rachel Malashock, NIH
- Chris Manly, Cornell University
- Stephanie Padilla, Unisys
- Ananya Ravipati, Internet2
- Tatum Tummins, Kion
- Justin Turner, NIH
- Jonathan White, University of Central Florida
- Nidhi Yadav, Internet2
Resources
- FinOps Foundation
- Cloud Computing Community Group (CCCG) presentations
- July 2024 Fast & Furious | FinOps Edition
- June 2023 Cloud Forum Redux | FinOps Style
- Sept 2021 Cloud FinOps Working Group Tips & Recommendations
- Cloud Forum 2024 Workshop - Beyond the Bill: FinOps Culture and Cloud Financial Responsibility
- Platform-specific Resources
- Other
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