Finops.World
FinOps Blog
September 2020

Why was FinOps born?

By Antoine Lagier

It has been 6 months that FinOps.World went live! Today, we have the pleasure to welcome you in its Blog section and we take this opportunity to introduce ourselves as well as FinOps.World in the FinOps landscape that is now being structured.

Why FinOps.World?

Let’s go back to early 2019: working with several Cloud experts, specifically the Public sector for many years, it clearly appears that there is a major concern for our clients: monitoring the expenditures in the pay-for-use world.

The first steps within the public Cloud and self-service can generally be joyful and even easy but the first bills arrive very fast: some question it quickly while others wait for the panic that comes after seeing how high they reach. However, all agree that it is necessary to actively monitor these costs.

Witnessing the hype, we decided to launch a FinOps Meetup (Join us!) to bring together a like-minded community and to organize knowledge sharing and meetings, which proved to be successful and we are now more than 350 members. Veolia, Oui.sncf, Renault-Nissan are some of the first participants.

At the same time, we collect and formalize a set of FinOps practices following our diversified field experiences: these are the 39 practices of the FinOps.World for which you have the first version on this very website.

Open Source 

From the very beginning, it was clear to us that this repository had to be available in Open Source for 3 main related reasons:

  • Enable a free use of its content by adapting it to your context without fearing any copyright restrictions
  • Develop collaboration without which we think there is no future for this repository.
    A GitLab depot is available for those who wish to contribute, each with what they can, to work together openly and efficiently. Feel free to join us there.
  • Prove to be transparent and clear out any suspicions that would lead to entry attempts from unique editors or digital service businesses

More details about the License Creative Common BY-SA-4.0 under which FinOps.World is published are available here.

Today’s FinOps ecosystem 

A few months before our first Meetup, in February 2019, the creation of a FinOps Foundation was announced by J.R Storment, co-founder of Cloudability (bought a few weeks later by Apptio) 

The foundation quickly moves afterwards onto the creation and the setting up of a training and certifications curriculum (only the first is currently available). A book was published by O’Reilly as well.

Things seem to get more into shape no without causing some trouble in the landscape here and there, where some criticized the proximity between the foundation and the editor Apptio.

Today, the foundation is finally on track: it officially joined the Linux Foundation umbrella in June 29th, 2020 and announced its founding members for each of these programs on August 17th of the same year. Today, the Slack of the Foundation actively hosts more than 2000 members. 

On its end, FinOps.World is neither a Gallic village, nor a second foundation.

We are part of a collaborative approach for collecting and writing of best practices of field experience. This approach is part of a french-speaking context, in which the Meetup is one of the ways of getting together and collaborating.

FinOps.World wants to complement what is provided by the foundation or elsewhere. We want to be the vector of change and acceleration for French speaking FinOps players, whether they are digital service companies, consulting firms, clients, or even editors which are not missing in France (poke CloudEasier, Teevity, Lota.cloud and more).

So who are we and where do we want to go? 

At the start of the adventure comes Timspirit, an IT Consulting firm in Paris.

But the question is rather, who will we become?

Timspirit is used to starting transversals initiatives since its creation (eSCM, itSMF, Syntec) and the FinOps.World approach is part of it. Today, other companies have joined us (Metanext, TNP Consultants) and about forty voluntary contributors from various companies (Veolia, Decathlon, Fnac Darty, Bred…) have shown up to help improve FinOps.World.

Coming back, we are starting the work on a second version of the repository.
We are also working on the next yearly Meetup calendar and are looking for testimonies and interested speakers (write us at contact@finops.world).

More steps and more news will come so let’s keep in touch!

See next post

Webinar: Understanding the challenges of FinOps for your organization

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