FinOps Foundation Joins Linux Foundation with Focus on Education, Open Source – InApps 2022

The FinOps Foundation (that’s short for “financial operations”) has joined the Linux Foundation in order “to advance the discipline of FinOps through best practices, education, and standards,” according to a statement. While the Linux Foundation often finds itself home to more technically focused endeavors, FinOps Foundation executive director J.R. Storment describes the move as one that will let the FinOps Foundation hand off all of the back office operations, so that it might better focus on certain issues, such as open source.

“One of the big categories for us, as part of the Linux Foundation integration, is a big focus on open source. The three goals of the foundation are around creating community, advancing practitioners and then building open source standards. This last year we spent time on the first two,” said Storment. “What we have not done well so far is building out the open source side. We’re open sourcing the principles, the frameworks for how to run the organization, how to build the teams, things like that, which are more cultural best practice, and we’re now starting to move into opening that up to bring in those things like scripts for integration and whatnot.”

On its face, the FinOps foundation may appear less technical, but as Storment explains, the focus goes beyond just teams and culture to the tools, integrations, and software needed to bring clarity into cloud spending. Storment further explains that FinOps arose partly from the move to cloud native and DevOps, where the ability to quickly procure infrastructure became a necessity for innovation and fast paced developer practices.

This is the basic problem that the FinOps Foundation is looking to solve: to better equip all involved to work together to understand the connection between cloud spending and developer and engineering practices.

“It used to be, to buy resources, servers, you had to go to a procurement team and there was a long lead time to do that. It sometimes took months. In the world of cloud, you essentially have this model where you have instant access to resources,” said Storment. “You’ve got no constraints to the amount of resources you can get and no delay between the time you need them and the time you receive them. This has been a huge accelerant for companies of all kinds to do faster experimentation, to be more agile and try new things, to adopt new technologies, but it’s fundamentally changed the way tech teams operate with the procurement and finance business teams, because the the purse strings are now in the hands of engineers.”

This is the basic problem that the FinOps Foundation is looking to solve: to better equip all involved to work together to understand the connection between cloud spending and developer and engineering practices.

“All these groups are coming together now to figure out a new model of operating and you can call it FinOps, you can call it cloud financial management, but there’s a new set of people, processes, and technology that these companies are having to utilize to do this,” said Storment. “So, last year we started the foundation as a sort of nonprofit trade association with the goal of basically helping to create a community for this group. A lot of people who are dealing with spending in the cloud have a hard time connecting with each other and because a lot of the topics are focused on engineers.”

As part of its efforts to advance FinOps practitioners, the foundation has introduced a free introductory edX course, Introduction to FinOps, that will cover “the basics of FinOps and how it can positively impact an organization by building a culture of accountability around cloud use that helps companies make good, timely, data-backed decisions in the cloud.”  The course is currently open for enrollment now and will start on July 21. Alongside this, the FinOps Foundation is also offering the FinOps Certified Practitioner Exam (FOCP) through the Linux Foundation, with more training and certification programs expected later this year. They include the FinOps Certified Platform (FCP), FinOps Certified Service Providers (FCSP) and FinOps Training Providers (FTP).

The Linux Foundation is a sponsor of InApps.

Feature image via Pixabay.

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