Andrew Nhem
FinOps Foundation
December 12, 2024 | Article: 5-minute read
Key Insight: Dozens of breakout sessions and interactive chalk talks at FinOps X give Practitioners insights from their peers to help solve real challenges that exist in their organizations today. Breakout session recordings are available on our website and YouTube channel for you to watch and learn from.
Away from the bright lights of the big stage, dozens of more intimate sessions also happen at FinOps X in the form of breakout sessions and interactive chalk talks. Presenters work hard to hone their content into concise and helpful insights, sharing lessons learned that others can take home with them and apply to their own practices. This content is formed around key FinOps Topics we see in practice today.
Over the last 18 months, the FinOps Foundation has seen a shift in the type of spending that FinOps practices manage. The majority of FinOps Practitioners across the globe are already managing SaaS, Licensing, and other Scopes beyond public cloud spending (1). At FinOps X in Barcelona, Practitioners shared how they are applying FinOps principles and best practices to areas of technology spending beyond public cloud.
Read: The Scope of FinOps Extends Beyond Public Cloud
Understanding Unit Economics, or the costs and revenue associated with delivering a product or service, is a key goal of the practice of FinOps. Unit Economics bridges the gap between what an organization spends on cloud and the fundamental value that cloud spending creates. Hear how fellow Practitioners are defining unit metrics and implementing this key Capability.
Read: Introduction to Cloud Unit Economics
The FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS™) is helping Practitioners at all types of organizations unify datasets from different sources, creating a source of truth on which to base data-driven decision-making. Learn how others are implementing FOCUS from the public to private sector, in large and small organizations, and across public and private infrastructure.
Read: FOCUS 1.1 Now Available. Adoption Continues for Practitioners and Vendors
FinOps and Cloud Sustainability have natural alignment, as optimizing resource cost often involves a corresponding reduction in usage that reduces carbon emissions. Just like in FinOps, Engineering teams are a critical part of usage optimization efforts, as they make infrastructure decisions that drive both costs and carbon emissions. Core FinOps Capabilities such as Architecting for Cloud and Workload Optimization also highlight the alignment between FinOps and sustainability.
Learn how organizations are leveraging the connective tissue that FinOps teams have sewn across Finance, Procurement, Engineering, and Product teams to achieve their sustainability goals.
Read: FinOps and Sustainability Teams Collaborate to Optimize Carbon
FinOps Practitioners know that the best way to optimize a product or service for cost is to design it with cost in mind from the get-go. This proactive approach to cost management at each stage of the software lifecycle results in lower operating costs than later-stage usage and spend remediation.
Learn from fellow Practitioners about how to establish a FinOps-aware culture where costs are considered at the architecture stage and controlled before a product is even deployed.
Read: Cost-Aware Product Decisions
Practitioners are exploring how to apply FinOps Principles and Capabilities to the cost of AI resources and services with token-based usage and cost models to highlight the value that these offers can deliver.
At the same time, Generative AI is being leveraged to democratize FinOps data for non-technical stakeholders. Cloud providers have integrated Gen AI capabilities with their FinOps tooling so users can ask questions in natural language to query the data.
Read: Cost Estimation of AI Workloads
A core Principle of FinOps is: Teams need to collaborate. Finance, technology, product, and business teams work together to continuously improve for efficiency and innovation. It is not only the FinOps team who perform FinOps activities. All FinOps Personas involved in using, tracking, managing, or directing the use of technology will benefit from working together using the FinOps Framework as an operating model.
Although these are intentionally not recorded in order to foster open discussion, we often hear that these are the most impactful sessions for Practitioners to attend. This year in Barcelona we held the following interactive chalk talk sessions. Please reach out to the presenter if you are interested in learning more about their session.
Check out the Day 1 Keynote and Day 2 Keynote recaps from FinOps X Europe 2024.
Join us at FinOps X 2025 in San Diego to be part of this exciting event next year!
