Primary Goal: Deliver faster and high quality services to the organization, while maintaining business as usual.
The Engineering Persona builds, runs, and supports the IT services that allow organizations to deliver value digitally. Engineering teams adopting FinOps use cost and resource use as a metric similarly to other performance metrics. They consider the efficient design and use of resources as they architect, design, and build IT systems in the cloud. They also are responsible for their cloud use, and perform activities like selecting appropriate resource locations, rightsizing (the process of resizing cloud resources to better match the workload requirements), workload management (only running resources when they are needed), removing unused resources, and monitoring for spending anomalies.
The Engineering Persona can be very broad, incorporating roles that include cloud architects, engineering leads, programmers, developers, SREs, DevOps team members, software engineers, systems engineers, service delivery, engineering managers, or platform engineering.
Objectives
- Drive accountability to engineering teams that are responsible for the application/services.
- Provide guidance to engineering teams to have a cost-effective application/service by identifying anomalies and best practices.
- Work together with engineering teams to identify rate reductions and possible cost avoidance
- Cost allocation
Challenges
- Unsatisfied engineers as their workload keeps rising.
- Long delivery cycles
- Cannot predict the impact on the budget
- Difficult to identify service or application ownership
- Cannot predict the costs closely enough for developing new features and products.
Key Metrics
- Revenue by infrastructure costs
- Cost per deployed service & service utilization rates
- Showback & Chargeback of IT costs to the business
FinOps Benefits
- Increased visibility to cloud cost
- Connection to cloud cost and unit economics
- More accountability for utilization
- Incentive towards solid architecture principles to factor efficiency
FinOps Engineering Persona includes:
- Software Engineer/DevOps Engineer
Engineers often have insights into application architecture and resource consumption, which is crucial for FinOps optimization. DevOps engineers, in particular, are often close to the cloud infrastructure.
- Cloud Architect/Solutions Architect
Architects have a strong understanding of cloud services and their costs, making them valuable in FinOps.
- Data Architect
Designs and oversees the data infrastructure for an organization, with a specific focus on supporting AI and ML initiatives.
- Systems Administrator/Engineer
Sysadmins often have deep knowledge of cloud infrastructure and cost drivers, which is valuable in FinOps.
- Software Architect
Designs the overall structure and architecture of software systems, ensuring scalability, performance, and maintainability.
- DevOps Engineer
Bridges the gap between development and operations, automating deployments, managing infrastructure, and ensuring smooth releases.
- Data Engineer
Builds and maintains the infrastructure for collecting, storing, and processing large datasets.
- Machine Learning Engineer
Designs, builds, and deploys ML models and systems.
- Data Scientist
Extracts knowledge and insights from data to help organizations make informed decisions and solve complex problems.
- Systems Engineer
Designs, implements, and manages complex systems, often involving hardware and software integration.
