Music: Beck - Lost Cause (2022)

This week we take a look at cloud costs and how hyperscale CSP native FinOps toolchains have expanded.

Getting Informed

First, I gave into ChatGPT temptation. After all, you can’t spell haiku without AI!

In fact, it actually took several attempts before the proper syllable counts were returned so movie reviews¹ are safe for now until our haiku model laden overlords iterate for greater precision.

But I digress. I can assure you this issue of the newsletter was typed in by me.

They see you come and they see you go 🎶

Public cloud spending is on a path to approach ~$1T and the independent software vendors FinOps tooling market is growing as well as recommendations to find folks to keep an eye on the cash register. Meanwhile, cloud service providers (CSPs) will have also created their own FinOps tools to enable customers to forecast the bills and connect the bills to value.

What this means is that the entire toolchain² just for FinOps is also evolving. In fact, The FinOps Foundation has recently canvased 838 FinOps practitioners for their most used of 69 different tools.

Source: Top 15 FinOps Tools via https://data.finops.org

They know your secrets and you know theirs 🎶

To keep this examination succinct, let’s look at a few examples from the CSPs themselves.

AWS has a portfolio of free to freemium

• Cost Explorer is limited, quick, free, and… just changed quite a bit
• QuickSight is accessible machine learning (ML) for lightweight forecasting for a fee
• Forecast is bespoke training and prediction modeling for a fee
• And everything else…

Azure has a mix of free and expanded use cases (like connecting to AWS for analysis) for a fee

• Cost Management is free for Azure use cases but using it for AWS incurs fees
• And assumes you embrace domain specific languages like Bicep for Azure Resource Management and visualization using Power BI

GCP has more of a DIY approach (batteries not included)

• Cloud Billing is free to enable and integrate with other services for a fee
• And assumes putting billing data into BigQuery
• And assumes visualization using Looker

Of course, many customer use cases will involve two or more CSPs and multicloud will be a feature requirement for FinOps toolchain choices. Naturally, there will be a combination of innovation and M&A in the coming years as competition for FinOps related spending hugs the curve of overall cloud spending while seeking to better manage… cloud spending.

Perhaps, one day there might even be a FinOps tool to watch over expanding FinOps toolchain costs that were initially used to watch over cloud costs.

So, what will be the next FinOps toolchain in the even expanding list for 2023?

Until then… Place your bets!

Work Plug

As a reminder, after a +25 year walkabout, I’m an IBMer (again). For 2023, in “Work Plug”, I’ll share a new link each week that is educational, accessible, and relevant to platform engineering from fellow IBMers³ in the wider IBM Community.

Stay tuned!

Disclosure

I am linking to my disclosure.