IT’S FaaS AND THE FURIOUS FaaS, or FinOps as a Service, as we know it, is currently an emerging business segment, and it’s emerging really fast. In this episode, Nick and Jason will be discussing how FaaS is truly defined, what its key advantages are, and why it’s an emerging business segment today. Check out and see if FaaS is a good fit for you in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY JASON: DEFINITION OF FaaS “FaaS or FinOps as a Service, FaaS providers, either through tooling or through services, or a combination of both, provide organizations with the necessary expertise and tooling to optimize their cloud costs.” NICK: CLOUD AS A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE “Cloud is a competitive advantage and allows you to move fast, just like agile did for the software development world. It took us out of quarter-long, half-year, or year-long development cycles, and put us in very short cycles that are responsive and helped us respond to market and users very, very quickly.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicklumsden/ Jason Yaeger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonyaeger/ Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

BEST PRACTICES ARE ALWAYS THE BEST REFERENCES Nick and Jason will be breaking down the best practices in FinOps and this will be a special episode as it will be in two parts. In this first part, the duo will be discussing allocation and accountability, particularly strategies for alignment in allocation, tagging, ownership of resources, and many more. Improve your FinOps or get started with it with the best practices by tuning in and learning more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY NICK: DON’T GET HUNG UP ON THE TAGGING AND ALLOCATION “If you don't know where to allocate something, tag it as such, just put a tag on it, it's Other, or Unallocated, or Uncategorized, or whatever. The important part there is you've made a deliberate decision that you need to come back and address those, and it's better than leaving it untagged because there's going to be other resources are going to show up in the environment not tagged and you want to not be lost in the noise of all the untagged stuff trying to find the newly untagged stuff” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicklumsden/ Jason Yaeger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonyaeger/ Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

FRAME IT, WORK IT Every system, process, or operation is built on a framework, and the same goes for FinOps. Nick and Jason continue with their FinOps series and today, they discuss the FinOps Framework and how it can be applied to your organization. Our duo gets down with the details starting from the core elements of the FinOps Framework, to understanding cloud usage and cost, and many more. Find out more about the FinOps Framework in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY JASON: THE CORE ELEMENTS OF THE FINOPS FRAMEWORK “They call them core elements. We've talked about some of them in some of our episodes, but Principles, Personas, Phases, Maturity, Domains, and Capabilities are the core elements of the FinOps framework.” JASON: ADVICE FOR THOSE STILL STARTING WITH THEIR FRAMEWORK “The first phase is to start with Inform. Inform gives you visibility and allows you to allocate your environment properly, budget, and forecast out into the future. So that's where I would start, with the informed phase, set realistic, SMART goals for the organization and what they want to achieve from either allocating, whatever is important, allocation, anomalies, forecasting, whatever is important to the organization, set those and then start to live up.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicklumsden/ Jason Yaeger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonyaeger/ Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

APPLICATION LEADS TO RESULTS. RESULTS LEAD TO IMPACT. We have talked about the definition of FinOps, its terminologies, benefits, and core principles. In this episode, Nick and Jason will be discussing how FinOps can impact your bottom line towards improvement. Our duo will be touching on lift and shift, allocation, visibility, transparency, predictability, and many more. Stay tuned to learn more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY JASON: THE PROBLEM WITH THE LIFT AND SHIFT “If you're only doing the lift and shift portion of whatever you're calling your digital transformation, or your migration to the cloud, in effect you’re not getting the true value from the cloud, because primarily, lift and shift deals with a lot of legacy compute.” NICK: FACTORS THAT IMPACT THE BOTTOMLINE “Direct effect on the bottom line, I'm gonna drop dollars down to my EBITDA, and then there's also rate-based optimization, so I'm going to be able to commit to using certain things, and right down to my bottom line. So those are sorts of two economic drivers for impacting your driving bottom line. But there are all these other sorts of value points, I think you touched on in the beginning of that which was visibility and transparency, this sort of idea of data-driven decisions. So now I can get predictability. So once I have predictability, then I can start to make decisions about things I want to do.” JASON: TRUE BENEFIT OF FINOPS “I think FinOps is designed to help companies increase revenue, lower the cost it takes to support that revenue, and allow companies to truly leverage the benefits of the cloud without the apprehension that comes with it.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicklumsden/ Jason Yaeger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonyaeger/ Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

LET’S TAKE IT DOWN TO THE CORE In the past episodes we have been diving into a deeper understanding of FinOps, and today we will be learning more. Nick and Jason will discuss the Core Principles when incorporating FinOps into your organization. The two will talk about the importance of communication, data-driven decisions, taking advantage of the variable cost model, accountability, and many more. So make sure you tune in until the end of this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY NICK: TEAMS SHOULD COLLABORATE EVERY SINGLE DAY “The best teams I've ever seen in the most secure organizations I’ve ever seen is where those two teams find a way to collaborate every single day by getting rid of each other's anxiety.” NICK: IMPORTANCE OF DATA-DRIVEN DECISION MAKING “This might be the most important, it’s data-driven decision-making, making sure that decisions are actually driven by business value in the cloud. And I think this is easy to say, I think every organization says it, but I think nearly every organization I have been involved with, at least early on, has been very immature in actually doing it.” NICK: TAKING ADVANTAGE OF THE VARIABLE COST MODEL OF THE CLOUD “Being able to take advantage of variable cost and the sorts of economics that can happen, once you get out of a legacy mindset around your app and get into the cloud first, or the cloud-native mindset runs your app. This is extremely powerful because I don't want my app consuming resources when the app’s not being consumed, and legacy models are built around persistent workloads that consume the cloud all the time. And you want to get to this world where I can take advantage of those variable costs.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicklumsden/ Jason Yaeger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonyaeger/ Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

IS FINOPS SALEABLE TO YOUR ORGANIZATION? As many organizations normally operate, every course of action that needs to be done or proposed to be taken will undergo a series of approvals and a whole lot of convincing and selling. If the action to take entails some cost, oftentimes it’s a hard sell. In this episode, Nick and Jason will be talking about how you can effectively sell the importance of FinOps in your organization. Stay tuned until the end in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY JASON: A SIGNIFICANT PORTION OF THE COST STRUCTURE “Cloud has to be a significant meaningful portion of your overall cost structure for the cost savings or optimization piece to bubble up to that level.” JASON: ALIGNING WITH THE PROBLEM VIA PERSONA “It's about aligning the problems that the organization faces, with how FinOps will solve some of those problems in the language that your persona identifies with. So as we mentioned with CEO, it's going to be about accelerating growth. We talked a little bit about CFOs, it's going to be more about cost visibility and making sure that you're accurately forecasting. But the key is that one, I'm assuming you have a set of problems identified, because you're looking at FinOps, and aligning those problems with how FinOps will help you solve them to the personas that you're talking to.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicklumsden/ Jason Yaeger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonyaeger/ Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

WHAT’S A COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS FOR WITHOUT TALKING ABOUT BENEFITS? In the past episodes, Nick and Jason have talked about the basics of FinOps, its definition, and the terminologies involved in it. In this installment of their FinOps series, the duo will be talking about the benefits of incorporating FinOps in your organization. The two will talk about the problems experienced pre-FinOps and how they are dealt with, capabilities for transparency and data-driven decision-making, and giving predictability to a project's cost. Learn more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY JASON: THE TRUE GOAL OF GOING TO THE CLOUD “Could you potentially save some money? Yes. I mean, that's definitely possible, because I'm going to use what I need to use, but it's not necessarily the goal of using the cloud, the goal of using the cloud is to grow, to become, to generate more revenue to be more innovative and to get things done faster than I ever can before.” JASON: FINOPS ALLOWS YOU TO MAKE DATA-DRIVEN DECISIONS “More than just looking, it allows you to take that data, not only to understand what my costs were, but also what my costs are going to be so that I can make better decisions about how I leverage technology. ” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicklumsden/ Jason Yaeger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonyaeger/ Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

UNDERSTANDING INDUSTRY TERMS IS CRUCIAL TO UNDERSTANDING OPERATIONS In any field of operations, it is very important to get your terminologies right. Teams cannot operate, communicate, or coordinate well together if they don’t talk or write in the same terms. This is why this subject should be discussed early on, and in this episode, Nick and Jason will be breaking down important terms in FinOps such as Blended vs Unblended Cost, Cost Allocation, On-Demand Pricing, Amortized Cost, Cost of Capital, and much more, so stay tuned until the end of this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY NICK: THE IMPORTANCE OF A COMMON VOCABULARY “This is important to cover early on because one of the first steps in any endeavor is really defining your vocabulary to help people communicate, and when we're communicating across Finance and DevOps, being able to bring those two teams together in a common dictionary, I think, is pretty important.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicklumsden/ Jason Yaeger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonyaeger/ Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

LEARN THE CYCLE, LIVE THE CYCLE Nick and Jason are back with the FinOps series and today, we will be learning the FinOps Lifecycle. The two explain what the lifecycle means and how it is broken down into 3 phases, which are Inform, Optimize, and Operate. Make sure to tune in until the end so you don’t miss a thing in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY JASON: DEFINING THE FINOPS LIFECYCLE “The FinOps lifecycle is a set of phases that are prescribed for organizations to achieve FinOps. So that's broken down into three separate phases in order, it's inform, optimize as the second, and then operate as the final third phase.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

WHAT DOES FINOPS REALLY MEAN? Welcome to another episode of Cloud Cost Optimization and today, Nick and Jason will be kicking off a series of episodes that will be focused on FinOps, its definition, how it helps, why is it getting more and more popular, and what it takes for an organization to start operating with it. The two will also give their tips on how your organization can get started with FinOps so make sure to stay tuned until the end. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY JASON: Definition of FinOps “It's a practice or a discipline set of processes that you can follow that enable organizations to get maximum value from cloud spending. And it does that by bringing together the stakeholders in cloud utilization spending, right? Finance, engineering, technology, whatever the business units you have been to, and it allows them to make better decisions on Cloud spending that are data-driven, instead of guesswork like our thumb in the wind from back in the CAPEX days. You can make sound data-driven decisions in the cloud. If you have the right set of tools and processes and discipline internally” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com