FinOps specialist CloudBolt has detailed its FinOps vision and wider strategy as part of a gathering attended by its global technical team, its sales front line and the company’s top management. Known as CloudBolt Lightning Strike 2024, we attended this year’s meetings to learn more about how a FinOps platform is engineered and architected, how it is implemented and used by organisations progressive enough to insist on this discipline existing in their cloud computing teams and where the real cloud value is when FinOps is in place.
CloudBolt Software is known for its FinOps platform skills and its technology that works to manage the automating, optimising and governing hybrid-cloud multi-tool environments for enterprises. FinOps itself can be thought of as an operational framework and cultural practice designed to maximise the business value of cloud and provide financial accountability through collaboration between the engineering, finance and business functions.
Looking at how FinOps is going to now take its place in the market, Kyle Campos, CloudBolt’s chief technology and product officer explains the CloudBolt roadmap and strategy as a defined move to apply insight and value across the entire ‘cloud fabric’ – an expression he uses to span private cloud, on-premises deployments and of course public cloud.
Rise of platform engineering
“We’re also now very focused on platform engineering – and this will be both fuelled and enabled by our approach to augmented FinOps driven by predictive and reactive insights that come from the use of AI & ML,” said Campos. “We are here to win, not to survive and we will do this by actions designed to disrupt, deliver & delight.”
What should be part of a rhythmic flow of software coming to market, CloudBolt has made a series of ‘high-performance hurdles and jumps’ says Campos, such is the scale of the disruptive technology that the firm is now working to bring to market.
“As we look at the integration of FinOps into platform engineering, positioning it becomes a key pillar alongside security and observability. With an increasing number of IT organisations adopting platform engineering as a strategic approach, the incorporation of FinOps is not just beneficial but essential for holistic success,” said William Norton, senior director of product marketing at CloudBolt.
Cloud ROI
To understand how FinOps can help enterprises achieve cloud value that resonates with what may now be significantly improved levels of Return on Investment (ROI), we can traverse a selection of the premier capabilities of the CloudBolt platform itself for some structural insight.
In the area of Cloud Fabric Orchestration, CloudBolt provides an orchestration framework that enables the customisation and extension of many back-end processes such as server provisioning and lifecycle management, user authentication and order approval flows. Then we come to the conversational interface, technology that provides the ability to ‘talk’ (via text-based input) to CloudBolt via a Natural Language Interface. “Right now, our default mode of thinking about how we roll out new features is ‘how many menus am I going to surface in front of customers’, but we know that conversational interfaces are changing the way we work with technology and this is the type of expectation that new users want to see working in all new technologies that they touch,” clarified Campos.
A very important element of any FinOps lifecycle, workload placement is the ability to know where certain cloud workloads should reside in a hybrid multi-cloud world where different price-performance parameters exist and where different cloud optimisations also exist. “I had to pick one thing that we had the inside track on, the area of workload placement is right up there – and as we know, this is the process of knowing which workload to place on which cloud service for the best cost and performance. Being able to take a ‘deployment event’ (a container, a collection of VMs) and being able to determine the optimal place for the workloads in those events to run and then take the next steps to actually orchestrate that move,” enthused Campos.
FinOps:: metrics that matter
Campos is also upbeat on the subject of FinOps metrics and he notes that the company wants to make FinOps metrics for the FinOps field mean the same thing that DORA metrics (DevOps Research & Assessment) mean to the DevOps world. We might have measured in months or quarters as a standard for working with cloud change based upon FinOps needs to change to weeks, or perhaps even days – and this is where CloudBolt now directs its focus. It all comes back to the company’s desire to codify what it calls the FinOps Performance Index = Insight-to-action lead time + cost coverage + optimisation score + allocation coverage.
“I’ve been in positions in my career where we (as a company) have been taking new products to market and trying to convince customers that an incremental development is a leap – and yes perhaps that’s the ‘meh’ moment sometimes when the market realises a development is underwhelming – but what is happening now with the CloudBolt platform is not that by any means, this is solid stuff” said Campos.
Broadening the FinOps horizon
Looking to the future as we work to broaden the FinOps horizon, CloudBolt suggests that we come to a point where many organisations may feel they can embrace the private cloud in a new era of cloud agnosticism. Although the current trend for FinOps teams to predominantly focus on public cloud spending exists, specifically on major providers like AWS, Azure and GCP, a shift is needed.
“There is a growing need for these teams to shift their attention towards private cloud investments, considering the evolving landscape where cloud strategies transcend specific providers, prioritising maximum value extraction,” asserted CloudBolt’s Norton. “We can now highlight and underscore the importance of cloud placement in determining product value, factoring in service pricing, licensing and various discount agreements. At the point we also need to highlight the pitfalls of operating with separate technology business management (TBM), IT financial management (ITFM) and FinOps methodologies without a unified strategy.”
The CloudBolt team urge us to make now the point where we issue a call to action for FinOps leaders to adopt a more inclusive, cloud-agnostic approach, recognising the significant role of private clouds in the broader cloud ecosystem.
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