Cloud FinOps, 2nd Edition

Chapter 27. You Are the Secret Ingredient

To loosely quote the Kung Fu Panda movie, the secret ingredient to FinOps is that there is no secret ingredient to FinOps. The secret ingredient to success is you. And it’s also every other person in your organization who influences cloud spend.

Spoiler alert: in the movie, the main character, Po (an endearingly clumsy panda) aims to be a great warrior. He receives a mystical scroll, which is supposed to unlock limitless power within whoever reads it. However, when he finally opens it, the scroll appears to be blank and has only a reflective surface inside. Distressed, Po gives up and returns to his boring life as a noodle soup vendor. Po asks his father the secret ingredient to the family’s famous soup. His father makes a startling revelation: there is no secret ingredient to the soup—the secret ingredient is the people who make it. This is a perfect metaphor for FinOps. We can’t tell you how to be a FinOps warrior, but we can tell you that if you lean into learning, collaborating, and improving, your practice—and your career—will flourish.

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably either fairly far down the path of working in or alongside FinOps, or seriously considering a career in the field. While 60% of enterprises already have some level of FinOps practice in place as of 2022, most don’t yet have a fully staffed team, and the other 40% will be staffing up quickly. Because if you’re doing cloud at scale, you’re going to need to do ...