{"id":18888,"date":"2021-07-29T17:50:51","date_gmt":"2021-07-29T10:50:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/renovacloud.com\/?p=18888"},"modified":"2024-12-02T17:24:56","modified_gmt":"2024-12-02T10:24:56","slug":"finance-vs-devops-why-cant-we-be-friends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/renovacloud.com\/en\/finance-vs-devops-why-cant-we-be-friends\/","title":{"rendered":"Finance vs. DevOps: Why can\u2019t we be friends?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It may just be the battle of the century\u2013Finance vs. DevOps. On one side, we have DevOps engineers who love speed and agility. On the other, we have finance practitioners who love careful planning and budgeting.<\/span><\/p>\n

The battle often takes place on the cloud. DevOps\u2013with their need for speed\u2013often buy up new cloud resources on the fly to support their continuous flow of new customers and onboarding. These resources cost the organization money, especially if they are not being managed properly. And that\u2019s where finance gets peeved. The cloud has a complex pricing structure \u2014 and if resources aren\u2019t planned, budgeted for, and managed, cloud bills can get out of control and negatively impact ROI.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So can these two seemingly opposite pursuits coexist\u2013or even better, be friends?<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0To get to the bottom of this workplace clash, let\u2019s dive into the mindset of each of these key professions and explore possible areas for compromise.<\/span><\/p>\n

DevOps and the need for speed<\/b><\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Speed plays a central role in DevOps culture and philosophy. In fact, the <\/span>Agile Manifesto<\/span><\/a>, DevOps\u2019 founding document states:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c<\/span>Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

through early and continuous delivery<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

of valuable software.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Welcome changing requirements, even late in<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

development. Agile processes harness change for<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

the customer\u2019s competitive advantage.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Deliver working software frequently, from a<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

preference to the shorter timescale<\/span><\/i>\u2026\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

According to this statement, one of DevOps founding principles is to create valuable software quickly, continuously improving as they go along. DevOps engineers often measure themselves on how quickly they can release new features and how many updates are made in a certain period of time.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This does not mean, of course, that quality is compromised. The commonly used DevOps best practice of <\/span>CI\/CD<\/span><\/a> (continuous integration and continuous deployment) ensures that changes in code are delivered reliably, on a regular basis, and at the highest quality.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So if quality isn\u2019t compromised in this quest for speed, something\u2019s got to give right?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Oftentimes, it\u2019s the cloud bill. And here\u2019s why:<\/span><\/p>\n

Say you need to quickly release a new product or feature to effectively compete in the market. DevOps will work fast to create it, often without considering costs for compute and storage.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As you onboard new customers for those new products and features, your application compute requirements will change. But predicting these needs 1-3 years in advance is almost impossible. Afterall, how do you know how many customers you\u2019ll get? This makes taking advantage of cost-efficient RIs and SPs a no-go.\u00a0 And as a result, you end up with low savings coverage and paying for costly On-Demand instances.<\/span><\/p>\n

Finance: They work hard for the money<\/b><\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u00a0The goal of finance departments is to manage cash flow, plan budgets, contain costs, and help an organization stay or become profitable. Unlike DevOps, planning is a key step in their workflow as they constantly analyze, evaluate, and track costs of the organization.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Though most finance teams do not have technical expertise and therefore, may not understand product requirements, what they do understand is an AWS bill that is growing exponentially and harming the company\u2019s ROI. Afterall, money talks.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For this reason, many organizations are implementing a specialized FinOps department which combines technical, financial, and business expertise. But in organizations that lack FinOps, the finance department must work together with DevOps to manage cloud costs.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is quite the challenge as cloud vendors like AWS have complex pricing structures that require careful architecting, planning, and allocation of resources. Ideally, plans should be made 1-3 years in advance so organizations can take advantage of lucrative deals offered by pricing models like <\/span>RIs and SPs<\/span><\/a>. In finance\u2019s dream, DevOps would be able to predict their needs ahead of time so the organization can avoid using costly On-Demand Instances. But that dream is easier said than done as application needs fluctuate.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

To get on top of cloud costs, finance requires all stakeholders to take a step back, optimize cloud architecture for financial success, and plan and allocate as many resources ahead of time as possible.\u00a0 Finance would also need DevOps to take ownership over the resources they create, constantly monitoring usage, getting rid of idle resources, etc. Of course, all of this planning, monitoring, and management could interfere with DevOps agility, especially if it\u2019s a smaller team. Hence, the tendency for tension and the finance vs. DevOps divide.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But is there a solution?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Resolving the DevOps-Finance Divide<\/b><\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u00a0At the end of the day, finance vs. DevOps does not need to be a battle. After all, both departments want the same thing\u2013for their organization to be successful. DevOps does this by building quality, customer-centric products and features fast in order to deliver more value and increase business. And finance does this by ensuring the organization does not spend more money than it has.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Compromise is needed. DevOps will need to plan their resources better, no matter how painful it may be. And finance will need to make an effort to try and understand product requirements, so they can help DevOps come up with viable and cost effective cloud solutions.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Both departments need to work together to track cloud costs using a BI tool that is either native to the cloud provider or offered by an external vendor. This will help them find instances that need to be right sized, detect idle resources, eliminate waste, see opportunities to buy and sell <\/span>RIs SPs on the AWS marketplace<\/span><\/a>, and track and usage overtime.<\/span><\/p>\n

For organizations looking for a silver bullet, AI and automation are just what the doctor ordered. If you implement tools that automatically delete idle resources for example, your organization can save millions of dollars depending on your use case. Looking into the future, it\u2019s certain that AI will play a significant role in managing cloud resources as it will make it humanly possible to to maximize cloud efficiency at a larger scale.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We are already seeing the impact of automation in cloud management. For example, <\/span>Renovisor<\/span><\/a> automatically buys and sells RIs and SPs according to real-time application needs. As a result, DevOps engineers no longer need to forecast usage or manually sell RIs and SPs. Instead, they enjoy savings of 45% with zero effort on their end\u2013a real win for DevOps!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And remember, when DevOps wins, finance wins because we\u2019re all just one big team anyway. The battle of finance vs. DevOps is finally solved.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Want to learn more about how <\/span>Renovisor <\/span><\/a>automated cloud optimization technologies can finally help DevOps and finance be friends? <\/span>Contact<\/span><\/a> us NOW!<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It may just be the battle of the century\u2013Finance vs. DevOps. On one side, we have DevOps engineers who love speed and agility. On the other, we have finance practitioners who love careful planning and budgeting. The battle often takes place on the cloud. DevOps\u2013with their need for speed\u2013often buy up new cloud resources on […]\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":18884,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[860,7],"tags":[11,35,368,746],"class_list":["post-18888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cost-optimization","category-devops","tag-ai","tag-aws","tag-devops-en","tag-renovisor-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renovacloud.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/renovacloud.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/renovacloud.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renovacloud.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renovacloud.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18888"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/renovacloud.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18888\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18889,"href":"https:\/\/renovacloud.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18888\/revisions\/18889"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renovacloud.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renovacloud.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renovacloud.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renovacloud.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}