FinOps Principles

The FinOps framework includes six principles that act as north star objectives of the FinOps practice. These principles are:

A centralized team drives FinOps

The central team encourages, evangelizes, and enables best practices in a shared accountability model. In this regard, the FinOps central team is much like security, which has a central team, yet everyone remains responsible for their portion.
Executive buy-in for FinOps and its practices and processes is required.
Rate, commitment, and discount optimization are centralized to take advantage of economies of scale.
Remove the need for engineers and operations teams to think about rate negotiations, allowing them to stay focused on usage optimization of their own environments.

Finance, technology, product, and business teams work together in near real time as the cloud operates on a per-resource, per-second basis.
Teams work together to continuously improve for efficiency and innovation.

Process and share cost data as soon as it becomes available.
Real-time visibility autonomously drives better cloud utilization.
Fast feedback loops result in more efficient behavior.
Consistent visibility into cloud spend is provided to all levels of the organization.
Create, monitor, and improve real-time financial forecasting and planning.
Trending and variance analysis helps explain why costs increased.
Internal team benchmarking drives best practices and celebrates wins.
Industry peer-level benchmarking assesses your company's performance.

Accountability of usage and cost is pushed to the edge, with engineers taking ownership of costs from architecture design to ongoing operations.
Individual feature and product teams are empowered to manage their own cloud usage against their budget.
Decentralize the decision making around cost-effective architecture, resource usage, and optimization.
Technical teams must begin to consider cost as a new efficiency metric from the beginning of the software-development lifecycle.

Unit economic and value-based metrics demonstrate business impact better than aggregate spend.
Make conscious trade-off decisions among cost, quality, and speed.
Think of cloud as a driver of innovation.

You should view the cloud's variable cost model as an opportunity to deliver more value, not as a risk.
Embrace just-in-time prediction, planning, and purchasing of capacity.
Agile iterative planning is preferred over static long-term plans.
Embrace proactive system design with continuous adjustments in cloud optimization over infrequent reactive cleanups.

For more information, see the FinOps Principles by the FinOps Foundation.