FinOps X day Amsterdam
Over the last 2 years, optimizing Snowflake from a cost perspective has been top of my list. My next step is to further expand this topic under the FinOps umbrella. The FinOps concept is new for me, so I decided to visit the FinOps X day in Amsterdam on September 23rd.
Around 400 people were present, it seems like a vibrant community and to my surprise (and perhaps relief) not a lot of software or services vendors in the audience, the absolute majority were FinOps practictioners from the field, working for companies such as Amadeus, Randstand, J&J, Bol, etc in the FinOps field.
The knowledge shared in the session was pretty much in depth, for instance the story about Bol and how they charge the costs for their cloud resources that are deployed in GCP.
Being a Snowflake guy, I found out that Snowflake was mentioned, had some chats about it, but it certainly was not a major topic. However, Snowflake and Databricks were mentioned in the keynote as 2 examples of data platform technologies that tend to run out of control as far as credits spent is concerned. This does not come as a surprise and within the FinOps spectrum, those 2 tools should certainly be high on the attention list.
One of the most interesting topics for me today, as I found out I kind of struggle with where to start, is the topic of scopes.
A FinOps Scope is a segment of technology-related spending to which FinOps Practitioners apply FinOps concepts.
A scope basically gives you focus, so far no surprise, but tailored to the FinOps framework:
Scopes determine which Personas, Domains, and Capabilities are Engaged
Examples of scopes from the presentation from J&J: public cloud, devops tooling, sustainability but also Databricks. When you work on one of the scopes, you will go in-depth on bringing insight into the costs, then optimize and after that operate with the newly gained insights from this cycle. Then, pick up the next scope and do the same. The eat-sleep-repeat pattern for FinOps that is.
Another subject that returned often: sustainability. Looking at the ‘green’ side of FinOps next to the costs. As I am working a lot in the energy domain, certainly an important topic there as well. To hook into that, I was happy to find out that on the way back I was in the ‘green’ train of the NS:
Let’s wrap this up: looking forward to work with my customers on the FinOps implementation and bringing insight into the cloud costs. Initially from a Snowflake perspective, but also on related topics like AWS, Azure/Fabric, etc.
Links:
My Medium articles about optimizing Snowflake: https://medium.com/@bidutch/optimizing-snowflake-your-complete-series-for-peak-performance-at-low-cost-c1b9ae165fd0