As the reliance on cloud computing continues to grow, so does the need for efficient and eco-friendly practices in managing cloud expenses and resources. This is where Cloud FinOps comes in.
FinOps is a set of practices and principles that helps organizations optimize their cloud spending. It provides a framework for understanding, optimizing, and controlling cloud costs while ensuring that the organization continues to innovate and deliver value.
But what does the future hold for Cloud FinOps? With a strong focus on sustainability and environmental responsibility, the future of Cloud FinOps lies in its integration with green Carbon initiatives. Now one would ask how we can link FinOps with Sustainability!
Recently FinOps Foundation has included “Cloud Sustainability” as a Capability in its Framework under the domain “Optimize Cloud Usage & Cost;” they have also included an Allied Persona for Sustainability. The clear focus is on aligning cloud sustainability strategies with optimization goals, identifications of opportunities, and how we can take sustainable actions by engaging with cloud and engineering stakeholders.
Interestingly, maximum cloud waste from a GreenOps perspective can be solved by focusing on the usual FinOps areas ranging from computing, Data Storage, Connectivity, Serverless, Application Development and Operations in an IaaS infrastructure. GreenOps in simple language, can be defined as the integration of sustainable practices and principles into FinOps processes, to reduce carbon footprint.
To implement effective GreenOps practice we have listed down 3 main areas:
- GreenOps at the Organization level
- GreenOps at FinOps persona level
- GreenOps at FinOps platform level
GreenOps at an organizational level
Organizations can directly contribute to GreenOps by creating a “Cloud Sustainability Ownership” model by:
- Reduction in carbon footprint via resource optimization practices must be included where sustainable actions and recommendations are a part of the KRA of each member of the FinOps team.
- Focus on developing a gamification model in the Cloud COE which rewards each member who contributes towards reducing carbon emissions by helping optimize the existing infrastructure.
- Management should work towards creating awareness and support for action on cloud environmental sustainability at all organizational levels.
Moreover, organizations can also do an in-house Cloud Environmental Sustainability Maturity Assessment where they can rank their actions on a questionnaire related to ownership of sustainable actions, tracking of carbon emissions with cost optimization levers, and reporting mechanisms in optimization. This can be facilitated by involving FinOps practitioners, cloud technical leaders and other FinOps Personas.
GreenOps at FinOps persona level
FinOps Practitioner
They should focus on wastage elimination, choose more energy-efficient options in cloud workloads, audit data as per efficiency and sustainability metrics, and share real-time data to make better sustainable business decisions.
Engineering (Engineering and Ops team members):
They should be aware of the sustainability implications of oversizing resource allocations and work to deploy highly elastic solutions and minimize the wastage of resources.
Members of these teams should be aware of the power consumption metrics and aim to build a robust but less demanding option wherever possible.
Finance:
Finance team members must work with engineering teams and guide the provisioning of more sustainable cloud options where minimal cost and carbon-emitting regions are prioritized for resource provisioning.
We have identified a few Optimization Focus Areas that lie in the Crawl stage (the nascent stage) and have a remarkably high Sustainability Impact, ie. Under Compute as rightsizing, choosing energy efficient instances, terminating unused or zombie instances, auto terminating development instances out of hours, etc. Under Operations using autoscaling and scheduling, real-time billing and usage alerting, and managing cloud trails. Under Storage using compressed data buckets, newer versions of storage classes, automated storage tiering, managing space efficient clones and snapshots. In terms of Cloud Strategy, we propose, selecting a CSP provider and infrastructure location based on regional carbon intensity, selecting energy-efficient workloads, and considering serverless or event-based architecture design patterns.
GreenOps at FinOps platform level
Many leading FinOps platforms have integrated a GreenOps module in their Multicloud dashboard which gives a view of Carbon Emissions (metric tons CO2e), Power Consumption (Megawatt hours) consumed by the Virtual Machines (VMS) and their Equivalencies.
In the latest announcements at FinOps X 2024 by Google Cloud, FinOps Hub now integrates with “Carbon footprint” to enable reporting based on the location of resources, to track, identify and manage carbon-efficient regions and to focus on sustainability goals. Microsoft has made a similar announcement with the release of “Azure Carbon Optimization” integrated with the Azure FinOps module empowers engineers to optimize individual resources for carbon emissions. With these integrations a FinOps practitioner working on a cloud-native platform can implement GreenOps effectively.
HCLTech’s Hybrid FinOps for Sustainable GreenOps
The future of Cloud FinOps lies in the continued collaboration between technology providers, cloud vendors, and organizations. HCLTech’s Hybrid FinOps is a new way of doing FinOps, where we have a FinOps practitioner-led approach that focuses on the hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure optimization where sustainable actions lead to better and informed decision-making.
Our practitioners understand the green initiatives and can work on any FinOps platform making the entire practice platform-agnostic and more people-driven. In conclusion, integrating sustainability into Cloud FinOps is not only a responsible choice but also a strategic one. Let us embrace the change in mindset and work towards a more sustainable and efficient Cloud FinOps ecosystem with HCLTech’s Hybrid FinOps.
To know more, you may write to us at HCBU-PMG@hcltech.com.
