FinOps in Action

FIA - Holiday Message 2025
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Alon Arvatz: [00:00:00] You should not tell your engineers what to do. You should empower them to take action. focus on business value. It's really important. It make the conversation a lot easier, a lot more mature. But don't forget to optimize cost, because at the end of the day you'll be asked about, Hey, how much you helped us save in the last year?

Intro: Welcome to finops in Action. I'm your host, Alon Arvas. Each week I'll sit down with finops experts to explore the toughest challenges between finops and engineering. This show is brought to you by 0.5, empowering teams to optimize cloud costs with tip detection and remediation tools that drive action.

Alon Arvatz: Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of finops in Action. Only that today, it's not just another episode, it's a very special one. Hanukah just ended. Christmas is the is ahead of us. The near is is just around the corner, and that's the time to summarize. 2025 that is approaching [00:01:00] to it, end.

And what I would love to do today is to share with you my key insights from 2025. So after talking to dozens of finops experts and FinOps leaders from around the world and across multiple verticals, I wanna share with you the top insights. They shared with me the ones that were repeated the most and the ones that are probably the most valuable to be a very, very successful FinOps person and have an extremely successful pheno practice.

So let's get to it. Number one. You should not tell your engineers what to do. You should empower them to take action. So obviously as FinOps people, we're always, always under a lot of stress to save money, to optimize costs. When it comes to commitments, it's easy. We can just do it. We don't need anyone's approval.

We don't need anyone to go through. When it comes to optimize the infrastructure, identifying, removing waste, that's when it becomes more [00:02:00] complicated, because that's exactly the point. We need your engineers to get involved and take action. Now, sometimes this stress causes us to tell you, Hey, look what happens here.

Look what you did here. Go ahead and fix it. But that's a mistake. You should not do that if you do that. Engineers will become defensive and won't collaborate. Reality that 99% of the times the engineers know better what type of infrastructure they need. They know better the application, so they're in the best position to decide what needs to be done.

So what is your role as a fitness person? Your role is to present to them the data. Tell 'em, Hey, look, I identified this pattern. Why don't we look together and see if there are anything to do here to become more optimized, more efficient? Hey, look at this account. Look at this resource. Look at this deployment.

I identify that, what do you think? And we do something about when you present the data, when you open it for a discussion, then [00:03:00] engineers open up to engage, take action, find the best solution, and eventually solve it. One of the greatest insights I got on the podcast this year was actually from Mike Berg who told me, don't only.

Don't only show them the recommendations, but also explain to them why it'll help them improve their career and their skills. Because now they're not only understanding how to develop applications on how to run infrastructure, but also how to optimize cost. So you should present it to them is career development.

And that's exactly what Mike does today at Nubank number two. A lot of people or a lot of FinOps people, they get into organization and they start working with engineers to try and drive optimization, and they try to build it bottom up, start with engineers, get them engaged, and then go to executive and show them the results.

That's a [00:04:00] mistake. Almost every finops leader I talked to that this year told me no, it has to be the other way around. It has to be top down. You have to start with executive buy in. You need that the CTO or CIO, or at least the COO will be on board and will make sure that engineers carve time to drive optimizations.

Otherwise, it goes nowhere. I had this conversation with Prashant and Paul from Cisco, and that's exactly what they stressed out when they started their fitness practice. They start with executive buy in to make sure that things can be driven forward from the executive team down to the engineering teams.

I even had this amazing recommendation from Erik Norman, who now leads pheno at British Airlines, who told me, Hey. You shouldn't take a finops job unless you know there is a buy-in of the executive team. So that's a bit of an extreme recommendation, I would say, but the still stresses the importance of a top-down approach to [00:05:00] finops.

Number three, you're not only FinOps people, you're also sales and marketing people, which means finops is still a very, very early practice. Not all engineers, not all organizations are aware of finops. Some of them don't even know what is finops. So your job is also to drive awareness.

Make it something that is important within the organization. So it means you have to be a good salesperson. So Tammy Burnitt from UiPath, for example, she shared with me that, Hey, I'm a salesperson. I'm going to the organization. My job is to explain, convince, why it's important. Obviously, when you're a salesperson, it's also extremely important to develop relationships.

Which is also something that many pheno practitioners share with me. You have to build relationship to make sure people understand the importance and listen to what you have to say. Over time, I think the most extreme insight I [00:06:00] got was from Schrider Isla from Adobe, who told me, Hey, I'm running and marketing campaigns to drive awareness and drive optimization.

So I give them a tagline such as, this year it's gonna be 26 under 26, which means. We are gonna have 26% of our workloads with less than 26% under utilization rate. So he give it a name. And he started a whole campaign with, with, uh. Education and training and projects and hackathons. So it's really not only doing ops proper, but also championing ops across the organization and literally being a sales and marketing person.

I would even say you need to read sales and marketing books to understand how to do it better. Last and FA, not least probably the insight I heard the most in the past year. Although I have some caveats on it, which I will share, I think it [00:07:00] is an extremely important one, and it is about what finops is all about and the fact that finops is not only about cost savings, but it's also about business value.

So a lot of organization, when they start their pheno practice, it comes from a place of, Hey, I need to reduce cost. I need to save money. I need to spend less on cloud because it's so expensive. That's most of the cases. And then finops is starting as a practice that is all around saving money. But the reality is that no matter what you do, no matter how much you're gonna save.

Cloud is going to stay very, very expensive and people will always ask, oh my God, we're spending so much. What are we getting out of it? And that is where the fitness person need to get in and explain to the organization not only how much they spend or how much they save, but also what is the value they're getting out of their cloud investment.

So it came to a point where people like Adnan [00:08:00] from s and p, for example, share with me that they share with their executive team exactly what they're getting out of their increased spend. So sometimes when the spend increases, it's actually positive. It means that you have more business. It means that you're getting more value out of your cloud infrastructure, and that's your job as a FinOps person to.

Make this value transparent and communicate it to the broader engineering and executive team. Now, I have to say, I absolutely agree with this insight, but it's also important not to forget cost optimization because probably no matter how much you'll talk about business value and how much your executive and organization will be bought in to talking about business value versus cost savings.

Probably in the end of the year, your manager or his manager's manager will ask, okay, how much we saved on cloud, how much we optimized? And you better have a good answer. [00:09:00] So focus on business value. It's really important. It make the conversation a lot easier, a lot more mature. But don't forget to optimize cost, because at the end of the day you'll be asked about, Hey, how much you helped us save in the last year?

So these were the four most frequently shared insights and recommendations that I got this year, and I'm sure all of you can benefit from. I hope you enjoyed the podcast in 2025. We have a lot of amazing new guests and great plans for 2026 as well. So keep following our podcast and as always, share with your friends about how much value getting out of the podcast and hope to see you next week.

Outro: That wraps up another episode of finops in Action. Thank you for joining. For show notes and more, please visit finops in action.com. This show is brought to you by 0.5, empowering teams to optimize cloud [00:10:00] costs with tip detection and remediation tools that drive action.