FinOps - the new name for performance tuning

This year I have been speaking with an increasing number of people about FinOps and what it means. Fundamentally, it is all about getting a handle on the cost for our technology spend. When we step back and look at the bigger picture it also has ramifications on corporate Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) programs about how the business is run. But what does this mean for a technology professional today?

First, FinOps is not a new concept. We have been doing the core work for most of our careers, and I have been speaking to people about this for years. There have been conference sessions from luminary speakers in the data community like Paul Randal, Kendra Little, Eric Darling, and many others at events for years. Right about now you are probably thinking, I don’t remember seeing or hearing them talk about FinOps…

That is because FinOps is all about performance tuning our workloads, getting the most efficient usage out of the resources we allocate to run these workloads. The only real difference is that now we have much better cost visibility through virtualization platforms and cloud. Historically we only had limited opportunities to optimize our spend, if we were buying hardware for a three- or five-year lifecycle then most of the work was concentrated around those refresh cycles. Now, our ability to create and scale resources on-demand and see the costs change almost monthly means that we can also affect it monthly.

Things that came up as top of the list for FinOps practices in my conversations were.

• Monitoring seasonality of workload so you know when to scale up/down or out/in based on resource needs.
• Turning off what is not being used.
• Performance tune queries to be as efficient as possible.
• Shift performance analysis left into development, understand the resource profile of the app and define what is an acceptable increase for a release to consume.

There are nuances to all of these and the wider processes, but this is all something that we are familiar with. So, when someone comes along and starts telling you about the latest and greatest trend called FinOps you can say that you’re familiar with it and have been doing parts of that for years.

It would be great to hear about whether you have access to all the things you need to move towards FinOps models, or about a time when you tuned a query that freed up a load of resources to the system.

John Martin

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