Chapter 27. You Are the Secret Ingredient
To loosely quote the Kung Fu Panda movie, the secret ingredient to FinOps is that there is no secret ingredient to FinOps. The secret ingredient to success is you. And it’s also every other person in your organization who influences cloud spend.
Spoiler alert: in the movie, the main character, Po (an endearingly clumsy panda) aims to be a great warrior. He receives a mystical scroll, which is supposed to unlock limitless power within whoever reads it. However, when he finally opens it, the scroll appears to be blank and has only a reflective surface inside. Distressed, Po gives up and returns to his boring life as a noodle soup vendor. Po asks his father the secret ingredient to the family’s famous soup. His father makes a startling revelation: there is no secret ingredient to the soup—the secret ingredient is the people who make it. This is a perfect metaphor for FinOps. We can’t tell you how to be a FinOps warrior, but we can tell you that if you lean into learning, collaborating, and improving, your practice—and your career—will flourish.
If you’ve read this far, you’re probably either fairly far down the path of working in or alongside FinOps, or seriously considering a career in the field. While 60% of enterprises already have some level of FinOps practice in place as of 2022, most don’t yet have a fully staffed team, and the other 40% will be staffing up quickly. Because if you’re doing cloud at scale, you’re going to need to do FinOps.
But here’s the rub: FinOps needs people, and there simply are not enough FinOps practitioners out there to meet the demand. Yes, you can—and should—try to automate as many of the repetitive tasks as you can over time, but to grow, train, evangelize, and build the practice requires a FinOps team radiating best practices, standards, and patterns. As it develops, the practice needs thoughtful executives to put in top-down cultural changes, thoughtful engineering leaders to begin integrating cost into their team’s workflows, thoughtful finance leaders to adopt more agile processes to more successfully partner with their engineering counterparts, and everyone to realize that winning the cloud value game requires a team effort.
Call to Action
The biggest challenge facing the FinOps industry—and, one could argue, the cloud industry by extension—is a dearth of skilled FinOps practitioners. But they cannot be created overnight. Like any discipline, it takes years to become proficient at FinOps, and reading this book won’t magically get you there—but it’s a great start.
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
Chinese proverb
Our challenge to you is twofold. Go forward from here and commit to learning. But also begin contributing to the larger community. The first part helps you and your organization while the second one helps everyone, which in turn helps you out since a rising tide floats all boats.
The industry needs its practitioners to get more standardized, more rigorous, to share more best practices, to do open source code contribution, to contribute to training and encourage others to take it, to focus relentlessly on upskilling internal teams, and to look for opportunities to bring in fresh faces to the career path.
The FinOps Foundation offers training for various personas associated with the practice, but that is not enough. Ultimately, we need to work together to get cloud value learning fundamentals embedded into university programs, code schools, even high school computer science classes. Will there be a bachelor’s degree in FinOps? Maybe not, but we believe a dedicated university module should be added to relevant degrees within the next few years.
The concepts you’ve read throughout these nearly 450 pages must start making their way back into conventional education programs not only for computer science–related disciplines, but also for accounting, business administration, finance, management, project management, and related degrees that ultimately end up being key stakeholders in a FinOps practice. Students graduating from any of these programs and heading to work in an enterprise that relies on cloud—and that is nearly every enterprise in the world—will be directly or indirectly involved in a FinOps practice.
There are norms for accounting, finance, and computer science that allow experienced practitioners in any of these fields to integrate quickly into similar roles at different companies. These same norms and principles, much of what we’ve seen discussed for years in the FinOps Foundation—and summarized in this book—must be carried forward to help make everyone more successful.
How to help:
Read the evolving canon of open source practices developing on FinOps.org.
Figure out where there are gaps that you can help fill: this raises the tide and it also gives your own career a visibility boost.
Take FinOps training and give feedback on what else it needs to cover or what new trainings need to exist.
Join a working group to collaborate with your peers on the definition of best practices.
Listen in on—or offer to speak at—a FinOps event. There are virtual summits, local meetups, and larger in-person events happening all the time.
Spread the word by bringing FinOps concepts into your work in related industry events and publications.
Need more ideas? See the FinOps Foundation Getting Started page for the latest ways to contribute back to the community, depending on your stage of maturity. You might start initially in listen-only mode but over time participate in working groups or even aspire to lead one, directly shaping the future of the industry.
The use of public cloud and its variable cost model will surely continue to grow. FinOps must grow with it to enable organizations to reap the benefits of using cloud without paying the enormous penalties that can result from using it poorly. You are a part of a vibrant and growing community that will be making the promise of digital transformation a reality for so many around the world, and we can’t wait to see what you’ll do next.
We look forward to seeing you in the community, where we can celebrate, struggle, learn, and build FinOps together.