For a long time now, I have thought hard about my role as a lead FinOps, and there was an itch at the back of my mind that bothered me about my definition of the role.
Fin - Financial
Ops - Operations.
Financial Operations
During the last 3 years, I have been consulting for many companies, from startups to enterprises, participated in meetups, panels and more, and I have learned a lot about how other companies and other FinOps are defining this role, and like "DevOps" - every company defines it differently - but it is almost always financial operations.
Here is the thing. We are not doing financial operations at Wix. We're not just reviewing invoices, reverse engineering our costs or purchase RI/SP/CUD on the cloud. We are not just looking at numbers and adding tags, and we're definitely not helpless when it comes to discussing expenses on the technical level.
We can hold our own discussing resource allocation in containers, architecture and design of Multi-AZ - Multi-Region, we understand all the basic fundamentals from provisioning, indexing, data storage, monitoring, BI operations, CI pipelines and architecture, and so so much more. We're not changing the types and sizes in AWS because someone told us to, it's because we know what to look at and to implement it if needed.
We are Infrastructure Financial Engineers - and we should be proud of it.
I am starting a small revolution on what people should look for when searching for FinOps - if you want proper value for your money - hire an engineer with the financial KPI in mind.
I plan to change the view on how people review this role - will you be part of this revolution?