Cloud FinOps Journey

I still remember how lost I felt during the first few months of starting my Cloud FinOps journey. I was learning about AWS and their plethora of services (which, by the way, it continues to expand). Understanding the basic pricing models - in most cases - was fine, but I quickly realised that that won’t cut it for me. There is only so much you can achieve by knowing that you can buy reservations and change storage tiers. To me, the real power of FinOps would derive from decisions that would directly affect how systems are built. But to get to that point, first I needed to understand what those components are and how they work together. And that’s what I will try to cover in this two-part post. First I will try to give a general overview of the basic components of a software (also known as the services that cloud providers offer), and from then build up to discussing Software Architecture (or how those components interact with each other). I don’t expect this to be a fully comprehensive...

“The Cloud”. We´ve all heard about it, surely, but how much do we know about it, really? And, more importantly, what is our role in relation to The Cloud?. For some of us, The Cloud is just a space where we store things online… You know, like photos, they are ‘up there’, safely stored (hopefully) and ready for me to use whenever and wherever I want. That was me, about 7 years ago. Just a regular cost accountant, with some inkling of and interest in the depths of technology. Then, one day, I saw a job advert that changed everything for me: “Cost Optimisation Consultant”. The description suggested that the role was about understanding and managing the costs of technology, more specifically the cost of “The Cloud”. In other words, what I was reading was the junction where my cost accounting background intersected with my interest in software and technology. That was “my call”, and where my FinOps career started. I must say, that road I took, not an easy and well paved motorway. More likel...