What is FinOps?

I remember back in the Open for Business days at an Apachecon (maybe NOLA) that there was a meeting for the Apache project’s system administrators. In that meeting I discussed the idea of Apache projects being allocated resource budgets and using OFBiz to enforce them and some senior guy was like “no, no, no and hell no”. I can see why IT departments would be afraid of strong accounting oversight but this transformation always seemed inevitable to me because of the way cloud computing is billed.

This concept of using accounting to drive IT operations is now apparently a buzzword, “FinOps”:

The FinOps Foundation operates under the Linux Foundation umbrella, which also controls CNCF, so I think it is safe to take them seriously.

Over the past two years we used Moqui in a similar way to manage renders for a 3D platform we built. In our system, customer work efforts and orders drive the actions that end up consuming resources and we track that utilization with native Kubernetes features because that was the path of least resistance. We have been on the lookout for standardization efforts in this area and Adam Heath came across this:

This provides some nice consolidated reporting features and a layer of abstraction for provider costs. The missing part of the picture seems to be something that could use budgets to manage platform access permissions that enforce compliance. I can’t help but wonder if Moqui could play that role.

Our implementation is made to fit our customer’s problem. I’ve often wondered what a generic solution would like. If you can imagine a world where all the machines in an organization were hooked into accounting and you had to have an approved budget to do anything what would it look like? (beyond no, no, no and hell no :-D)

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Thanks for sharing @schue , great topic for our next community call.

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