You know that you spend a lot of money on the cloud. How much of that spend is necessary? And can you improve the efficiency of your spend? These are questions affecting every team and company running cloud workloads. The global economy is slowing due to the pandemic. Cutting fat is critical to keeping companies profitable or, in worst cases, afloat.

As a fast-growing startup, PerimeterX (where I work) began thinking about FinOps several years back when we realized that our infrastructure spend was a black box that could significantly affect our business - both positively and negatively. Everyone in DevOps has read about (and possibly lived through) the horror story of a massive surprise cloud bill because of a dev team mistake or someone forgetting to shut down a sizeable temporary cluster or an emergency response to a scaling event was not unwound in a timely fashion. The goal of FinOps is to prevent these types of disasters by allowing teams managing cloud infrastructure to analyze and interrogate their spend and test hypotheses about the interplay between cloud services.

The big surprise? Diving into the FinOps challenge opened our eyes to how an outstanding FinOps practice can not only save money but also lead to better customer experience and smarter product design.

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