Cloud Control podcast: FinOps for the rest of us featuring Sara Gadallah

FinOps is a rapidly transforming landscape that plays a crucial role in driving business growth, efficiency, and transparency. But how does it work into a solid cloud operations strategy?

On this episode of Cloud Control, presented by Spot by NetApp, host Shon Harris talks with Sara Gadallah, Principal Cloud FinOps Analyst at Atlassian, to discuss the role FinOps plays in CloudOps.

Sara shares her journey into FinOps, the practices of FinOps, and how collaboration between different teams is essential in taking informed decisions on cloud cost optimizations. They also discuss the importance of continuous collaboration and education, the culture change needed to drive engineers to see cost as another operational metric, and the alignment of FinOps and data security.

Episode highlights:

• Introduction of Sara Gadallah and her journey into FinOps (0:00:02)
• The misconception that FinOps is only about cost savings (0:02:10)
• The importance of collaboration between different teams in FinOps (0:02:33)
• What is FinOps, and how do you explain it to someone who has never heard of it? (0:03:45)
• How FinOps enables businesses to get more for every dollar they pay in the cloud (0:04:53)
• Sara’s experience joining Atlassian’s FinOps team and the impact it had on the company (0:05:08)
• The crawl/walk/run methodology of FinOps and where Atlassian’s FinOps capabilities stand (0:07:30)
• The challenges of getting engineers to take action on cloud cost optimization and how it’s changing (0:08:43)
• The importance of continuous collaboration and education in FinOps (0:09:09)
• Breaking down silos and integrating cost as another operational metric (0:10:30)
• The alignment of FinOps and data security (0:12:06)
• Understanding cost anomaly detection and the importance of involving finance (0:13:28)
• Quantifying the benefits of FinOps to management (0:15:02)
• The culture change needed to drive engineers to see cost as another operational metric (0:17:51)
• The importance of empowering engineers with data to take informed decisions on cloud cost optimization (0:18:06)
• The role of FinOps in bridging the gap between finance and engineering (0:19:20)
• The impact of FinOps on engineering resource allocation and utilization (0:21:03)
• Empowering engineers with data to take decisions on cloud cost optimization (0:22:02)
• The importance of sustainability in FinOps (0:22:27)
• Atlassian’s use of homebrew tools and internal collaboration for FinOps (0:23:51)
• The structured process of cloud cost management at Atlassian (0:25:35)
• The importance of unit economics and tracking cloud cost usage (0:26:35)
• Empowering engineers to optimize service cost and providing recommendations (0:27:03)
• The challenge of tagging in proper cost allocation and data visibility (0:29:10)
• The importance of data-driven decision making in FinOps (0:29:26)
• The impact of FinOps on sustainability and innovation (0:29:58)
• The crucial role of tagging in cost allocation and data visibility (0:30:39)
• The challenges of managing tags and the need for a unified standard (0:31:43)
• Trends in 2023 and beyond, including unit economics and pricing structure (0:32:44)
• The role of FinOps in setting unit costs and optimizing towards specific metrics (0:33:53)
• Sara’s background and journey into tech (0:35:18)
• Tips for those who want to work in FinOps (0:39:04)
• The different roles within FinOps and the importance of connecting with the FinOps Foundation (0:39:35)
• The crawl walk run journey of learning FinOps and the importance of taking things one step at a time (0:40:04)
• Sara’s hobbies outside of work, including cycling, traveling, and reading (0:40:52)
• Previewing Sara’s upcoming talk at FinOps X with Teresa Mead on cloud budget processes at Atlassian (0:42:13)

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