The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organisation enabling mass innovation through open source, has announced the intent to merge the FinOps Foundation to advance the discipline of FinOps through best practices, education, and standards.
The FinOps Foundation includes 1,500 individual members across the globe, representing more than 500 companies with more than $1 billion in revenue each.
In the same way that DevOps revolutionised development by breaking down silos and increasing agility, FinOps increases the business value of cloud by bringing together technology, business and finance professionals
with a new cultural set, knowledge skills and technical processes.
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Mike Dolan, the vice president of the Linux Foundation, said: “Where there is technology disruption, there is an opportunity for business transformation. FinOps is exactly this and represents a shift in operations strategy, process, and culture.
“This type of disruption and transformation is also where community and industry-wide collaboration play critical roles in enabling a whole new market opportunity. We’re pleased to be the place where that work can
happen.”
The FinOps community is defining cloud financial management standards and is increasing access to education and certification for this discipline across industries. As part of this effort, the Linux Foundation is announcing a new, free edX course, Introduction to FinOps.
The aim of the free course is to advance education and knowledge in this emerging area and to cultivate a growing community of professionals. This introductory course will cover the basics of FinOps and how it can positively impact an organisation by building a culture of accountability around cloud use that helps companies make good, timely, data-backed decisions in the cloud.
The course is open for enrollment now, and the content will be available to begin on the edX platform on July 21.
The FinOps Foundation is also now offering the FinOps Certified Practitioner Exam (FOCP) through the Linux Foundation. More training and certification programmes are expected later this year, including the FinOps Certified Platform (FCP), FinOps Certified Service Providers (FCSP)
and FinOps Training Providers (FTP).
J.R Storment, the executive director of the FinOps Foundation, adds: “Technology and business leaders are seeking support for understanding how to manage cloud technologies and spending across their enterprises and the FinOps Foundation brings to bear the resources required to enable them to innovate inside their companies.
“With the Linux Foundation’s support, especially across its world-class training organisation, we can serve this growing community.”
FinOps is the operating model for the cloud, which is resulting in a shift that combines systems, best practices, and culture to increase an organization’s ability to understand cloud costs and make informed business decisions.
FinOps ensures that companies get the most value from every dollar spent in the cloud. It pushes accountability for spending to the edge where
developers control purchasing decisions and provides a new set of centralized processes to maximise the efficiency of purchases and the ability to allocate spending to teams.
Cloud spending is forecast to exceed $360 billion by 2022, according to research firm Gartner, but finance teams have very little insight into where that spend is being allocated within their organisations.
The result is uncontrolled costs that aren’t properly forecast or documented along with lack of standardised tooling, which can lead to major losses or errors in critical accounting practices. Procurement of IT infrastructure has moved from taking days or weeks to seconds or minutes, which has dramatically accelerated application development but dramatically
decreased efficiencies in financial operations.
Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, reiterates: “As the cloud-native movement deepens inside organizations large and small, understanding how to optimise the infrastructure footprint through cultural change and engineering practices is critical.”
