Cloud FinOps, 2nd Edition

Chapter 26. FinOps Nirvana: Data-Driven Decision Making

The nirvana stage of FinOps is when accountability for spending is fully decentralized to engineering teams who make efficient choices every day—not just when there’s a mandate—empowered by leadership support who have made cost a first-class citizen alongside other critical software performance metrics.

The goal is getting to a place where your organization makes ongoing, data-driven decisions on cloud spend based on business value. Who makes these decisions?

• Architects, when they are designing infrastructure

• Engineers, when they are writing code and deploying services

• Finance and procurement teams, when they are making commitments to cloud providers

• Leadership, when they are driving technology strategy

It’s an ongoing collaborative effort that can fully happen only when a FinOps cultural transformation has occurred.

Everything you’ve done to date has enabled you to get here. You’ve allocated spend, set optimization goals, and implemented procedures to enable your teams to reach those goals. You’re continuously exercising the FinOps lifecycle, refining your allocation strategies, setting metric thresholds, and providing increasingly refined visibility into cloud usage each time.

But there’s still a gap. Each time your bill goes up, the debate reopens about whether the spend is good or bad, i.e., whether the spend levels are the right ones for the business outcomes you’re trying to achieve. Has the bill increased due to ...