What is FinOps?
FinOps is an operational framework and cultural practice for getting the most business value from cloud and other technology spend.
Why it matters
The FinOps Foundation describes FinOps as an operational framework and cultural practice that brings engineering, finance and business teams together. Everyone takes ownership of their own cost and usage, supported by a central best-practices group. The name joins Finance and DevOps. It started with cloud cost and usage, and now also covers spend on SaaS, licensing, data centres and data cloud platforms.
FinOps is about value as much as saving money. Teams trade off speed, cost and quality in their architecture and investment decisions, and practices mature in a Crawl, Walk, Run pattern. The billing data, tagging and cost allocation FinOps teams build are the same foundations GreenOps needs, so teams that already practise FinOps usually start GreenOps fastest. The FinOps Foundation includes sustainability as a capability in its framework.
An example
A FinOps team reviews its rightsizing recommendations with engineering. Some have stalled because the cost saving alone has not been enough to get them done. With an energy and carbon figure added to each one, the same list also serves the company's emissions goals, and engineering and leadership have a second reason to approve the work.
Where Greenpixie fits
Greenpixie works alongside FinOps tools. Its enrichment keeps every original column and row of a billing export and adds columns for electricity, usage emissions, embodied emissions and water. Sustainability figures can then be grouped by the same accounts, tags and services FinOps teams already report on.
The data can also be loaded into FinOps platforms such as Flexera, Apptio, CloudHealth or Umbrella, so teams get it without changing how they work.