FinOps is *not* about "reducing 35% waste" on the cloud.
Everyone can look at a machine that is underutilized. Everyone knows that there should be TTL for data. Reducing waste is easy. If that is what you're aiming for - you don't need a FinOps practice in your organization. Everyone's talking about the 35% waste in the cloud while referring to non/underutilized workloads. But, how about the 100% utilized workloads? Clusters that are heavily used, all the time?
So, what FinOps is about then?
Driving company's value. We all understand we need to invest money to make money. FinOps's role in the organization, to sum it up in one sentence, is to make sure we invest in the right places. I have never been to a FinOps meeting, conference, or panel where I've heard FinOps engineers talking about actually creating success criteria for existing workloads, that didn't involve the infrastructure side of things. FinOps's role is not just to understand what is running on this workload (Tags), and how much this workloads costs (CUR, CID, BQ, etc.) - but WHY. Understanding if a workload contributes to the business and its revenue.
Applying these success criteria is the first step in understanding true waste on the cloud, and mapping the company's workloads to understand what drives value to the business.
What are the following steps? Stay tuned.