Cloud FinOps, 2nd Edition

Chapter 4. The Language of FinOps

Each team within your organization likely uses discipline-specific terms, views cloud billing data from a different perspective, and has separate motivators for what they would like to achieve. This chapter discusses how you can enable teams to collaborate more effectively by educating staff on specific terms being used by each and by defining a common lexicon to encourage alignment and trust.

Stories from the Cloud—Mike

Prior to starting a FinOps practice at Atlassian, teams tracked their own costs and used their own methods for deciding which parts of which bills were their responsibility. My first action was to create reports and send them out to the business teams. But I left out a vital step. Teams read the reports from their own perspective, just as they’d always done. My reports didn’t clarify cloud spend—they confused it. The terms I used didn’t make sense to everyone, so different teams ended up with divergent opinions about the reports’ validity.

Seeing all of this, I realized we needed a common language. I needed to create a broader understanding of FinOps terms and a common set of reports that all teams could use to track their spend and optimizations. My previous reports, filled with cloud-specific infrastructure language, caused confusion and frustration for the finance team, just as the reports focused on cloud financials did for the engineering teams.

An early stage company typically starts with simple daily spend visibility ...