finops – Scriptingthewhy.com

How Cloud Cuts Your Budget

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businessman seated worrying — AWS…I could’ve cut cost going with Google cloud. Multi-cloud nonsense.
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Here’s a situation, you are working on your small business and you’re thinking about growing your enterprise so you can further scale to make your company become the industry giant you have set your sights on.

However, you begin to notice that cash isn’t flowing like it once was. You begin to question: “Why? How did this happen? I know my company is turning a profit. What in the world is going on here?” You check your business account only to find your money has been going places it doesn’t need to be.

You find you don’t need this stress since you have other pressing things to worry about and trying to get your finances back on track doesn’t rank high on your to-do list. This situation would be better suited if you had access to a certain team of people with a particular set of skills (my second Taken reference sorry).

There’s a name for a group of people that handles the operation of financing, but I just can’t recall it.

someone seated counting money — Counting money that doesn’t belong to me gets old very quick.
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Clouding Around

Do you want to cut costs and track your money in the meantime and all the while grow your business to new heights? How would one do this you might ask?

Well, you have two options which are 1) you could venture to handle everything yourself which in turn would be a complete and utter nightmare, seeing you go from 0 to 100 in 1.5 seconds flat due to the fact you got overwhelmed, or 2) find yourself a team of people who could manage and monitor, assess, and even advise your finances for you.

What group of people would be crazy enough to do such a thing? Financial Operations or FinOps for short. FinOps is a cultural practice that brings cloud technology and business altogether to drive accountability and maximize business value.

FinOps are governed by six principles: collaboration, ownership, centralized cost savings, reporting, value, and taking advantage of variable costs. If you’re looking to scale your business and moving to the cloud or growing your cloud is going to be on the menu, FinOps are going to be one group needed to make sure all resources are accounted for and the budget stays on track.

In a nutshell, you can think of them as accountants for your current or future cloud.

credit card transaction — I sure could use a team of accountant to explain why business card keeps declining.
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Sales in Failure are Final

Oh dear reader of mine, you may be thinking to yourself, “Why would I hire an accountant? I manage my bank account and business account just fine. I budget well, I’ve got nothing to worry about.”

Well, as mentioned before, if you lack the skill set to operate in the cloud and begin to connect resources without a care in the world, your dollar sign will quickly get overwhelmed. Everything costs in the cloud down to the computing power which could range from a second to minutes.

So yeah, money management would get out of hand before you even completed computing “Hello World” using a Lambda function. Therefore, having a FinOps team would be very beneficial. What group of people would turn to FinOps for information?

Financial planners, analysts, business managers, and advisors use reports from FinOps for cost allocation and forecasting. This is like having a weatherman in your business, but they’re actually paid to get the forecast right.

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a team of people looking over data — Third quarter isn’t looking good, might be another quarter in the red.
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Fins Cuts the Budget

How much does FinOps have a play in the world of today you might be wondering. Well, that depends on what part of the world you are in, if you’re the employer, you’re more likely to hear about how certain cloud resources are outside of your budget and how you should be focused on cutting costs.

If you’re the employee, then it’s more likely you’re hearing about how cloud resources you could use, and need are outside of the company’s budget and how much the company needs to focus on cutting costs.

FinOps has been around since 2012 and many companies both big and small have adopted the FinOps framework to run their business. This adoption helps edge out the competition by enabling companies using FinOps to be capable to make better data-driven decisions, reducing costs on wasted resources, creating investment opportunities, and increasing transparency.

Just think of them as all good things to have if you get hit with an audit. Again, this group has a particular set of skills that work in your favor, just don’t forget to pay them on time.

older fellow seated at table — So you think you have a future in FinOps?
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Choosing Paths

So, you may have the response “Nah, I can handle my budget and others with no problem. Just tell me, do I need a degree?” There’s some good but pricey news, you don’t need a degree to get into FinOps, just need to be familiar with their core principles.

FinOps is a cultural mindset developed to provide accountability to a business. Your time will be better suited to pursuing certifications with some specialized credentials like a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) or Certified Equity Professional (CEP) however, obtaining these certifications is not going to be easy, and knowing your stuff when it comes to financing is a must.

Another option is you could join the FinOps Foundation and select from their courses to become either a certified practitioner (I know I mentioned this step but skip becoming a practitioner, employers don’t recognize them) or hop right into becoming a certified professional. Just know, this is going to get pricey since this ranges from $599 – $3,750 (I did say I had some pricey good news).

But if you’re trying to learn on a budget, again Zero daddy has you covered. There are other resources, Coursera has one course on FinOps provided by Intel, and there are several courses on Udemy. Just stay away from getting caught up in tutorial hell. Gain a deep understanding of the basics, build upon them, and keep on moving.

After obtaining some of these credentials and online courses, you will be able to demonstrate your knowledge of investment and financial management best practices. Or you could do a combination if you have the time and money, it all boils down to what goals you have in place.

typewriter with paper saying "goals" — Goals without actions are only dreams.
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Think there something that might have been missed about Finops? Script a comment below.

AI, Cloud Talk, Programming, Security, Tech

Degreeless Teams and Loose Commitments

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people looking into a laptop — Lee: Guys, I don’t like going to scriptingthewhy. Let’s just go back to work.
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Have you ever been on a team and no matter what or how hard any of you try, nothing seems to mesh well? You all get along and work well together but none of the ideas any of you provide for a project you’re working on yields any positive results.

Suffering the same circumstances of just being another failed new year’s resolution where either you or someone on the team falls off track by getting distracted causing scope creep.

Or no matter the pace that’s set it seems not to be fast enough and you’ll never see the project done. How would you feel if I told you that adopting a different framework from what you’re familiar with might be the remedy to your and your teams’ problems?

As I have mentioned in a script before, this might be another process you will come to trust.

young running down the road — Tim: I have to be more agile; I can do that with sprints.
Z-Daddy: That’s the wrong agile, you don’t have to do CrossFit.
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Full Team Full Sprint

What’s this crazy new process, this insane new wave of thinking that’s going to see your party moving along so you can get done sooner rather than later?

You might want to switch to Agile. No, not being more agile although I see what they did there, and you will too. Agile methodology is a way to manage a project by breaking it up into several phases.

In software development, Agile practices include requirements discovery and solution improvement through a collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams with their customers or end users.

Instead of betting everything on a “big bang” launch, an agile team delivers work in small, but consumable, increments. I know what you’re thinking, no this would not work at a casino if you tried this approach. In fact, this would see you being asked to leave the table with two well-dressed gentle-for-right-now-men wanting to “question” you and you’d be lucky to leave with a broken hand.

The Agile Manifesto for software development was a declaration of unifying philosophy from frameworks like Scrum, Extreme programming, and Feature-Driven Development (FDD). The Agile Manifesto greatly departed from the waterfall-style project management approaches that were widely in use prior to that time.

The Waterfall methodology is a project management approach that emphasizes a linear progression from the beginning to the end of a project. This methodology, often used by engineers, is front-loaded to rely on careful planning, detailed documentation, and consecutive execution.

Translation, there’s an Everest amount of paperwork to do. So, if you look at it in a corporate way, Smokey the bear was right. You can prevent forest fires…by simply cutting down the forest.

Now, the following is in their words, and their wording is well… going to sound a bit interesting; “We are uncovering better ways to developing software by doing it and helping others do it.” Yes, this does sound like a spank me daddy moment. Come get yourself a Scrum Daddy. Okay, that was cringe, I’m sorry. Back to the manifesto,

Through this work, we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.”

I think everyone would agree to add one more line saying, “pay to merit over able to punch the clock.”

a young man delivering items — Look at this and try not to have a Karen moment.
Karen: Sir, you don’t live here.
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Taste of Agile

You may be wondering, who in their left-wing corporate America mind follows this way of thinking to get a project done? Well, you’ll be glad to know that there are a decent number of companies that use teams who operate in this fashion.

Agile is the best methodology to follow in cases of complex projects. A complex project may have various interconnected phases and each stage may be dependent on many others rather than one as in simple projects.

The most well-known companies that use Agile methodology are Apple and IBM (yes, we’re still not on speaking terms), Microsoft, and Procter & Gamble. However, there are many other companies that use agile as well, to great effect.

Yes, I know it might not taste like it, but you will be surprised to know McDonald’s uses Agile. As you can figure Agile methods are preferred for large and complex projects.

So the next time you decide to go get yourself some McDonald’s, take a big bite and don’t chew, I want to watch you from the corner of the room swallow and take comfort in knowing a team of people puts that juicy maybe-it’s-real-meaty big bun action together for you to enjoy.

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two men sitting at a computer — Mark: Eric… I know it looks like you’re working on the project, but looking at your tabs I also see you’re…
Eric: It’s Stack Overflow, they just turned their colors to black and orange.
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Fixing Loose Ends

Ever thought about who and how this framework helps? Me neither until now. The Agile framework is a powerful tool that helps managers, team members, and clients work more efficiently and more effectively while delivering the highest quality product within the constraints of the budget.

You can think of this as an assembly line in a factory where the belt can go back and forth instead of just one direction. Agile produces important metrics like lead time, cycle time, and throughput that measure the team’s performance, identify bottlenecks and make data-driven decisions to correct them.

It seems like a lot of back and forth, but this is better than pushing a product out only for it to come back with a monolith list of items to fix. If you worked in the market of flipping houses, you will know that it’s the worst when you’re about to put the house on the market only to find more things that need fixing.

young lady in graduation outfit. — Sarah: You mean I didn’t have to get a degree to join an agile team?
Z-Daddy: No, nor do you have to join CrossFit.
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Framing Degreeless

Do you need a degree to be Agile? Well with this being a framework and not job placement, you don’t need a degree however, many employers prefer candidates with a bachelor’s degree in a relevant field, such as Information Technology.

The need to have a degree in the IT field or any other fields where people have displayed, they can land a job or start their careers without one, has always been one of those weird barriers put in place.

It’s like having a bouncer at a nightclub and to get passed him, you simply dress as a ladyboy. Companies, it’s okay, you don’t have to be in the closet anymore, stop keeping the degreeless jobless.

My ranting aside, you don’t have to be a person or team in IT to be introduced to Agile. Each team will benefit from collaboration, recurring interactions, recognizing failure early, incrementing fast results, and finally continuous learning. If you wanted a position, you could become a Scrum Daddy.

Scrum Daddies should have significant work experience working with Agile as well as excellent teamwork and communication skills. Always remember to be a good daddy and bond with your children.

older gentleman seat at laptop and on phone — Honey, we don’t have to worry about my hip, some guy named Z-Daddy said we were thinking of the wrong agile. So, cancel the CrossFit subscription.
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Made it this far and found this to be entertaining? Then a big thanks to you and please show your support by cracking a like, sharing this with whomever, scripting a comment, or plug-in to follow.

Would like to give sincere thanks to current followers and subscribers, your support and actions mean a lot and has a play in the creation of each script.

Do you find the Agile framework interesting?

Script a comment below about how you think it could help you.

Cloud Talk, Tech

Cloud by an Angel, view how to…

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City in the clouds — We’re years into the future and we’re still not living like this, uh humans.
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Have you ever had that moment where you’re seated at your computer and thought to yourself, “there’s a lot of news on cloud computing. Seems like it’s a big deal. I wonder who puts everything in the cloud together.”

Well let me tell you, there are a certain group of people that have set things in place for any data you send to be able to reach your cloud (it may go to someone else’s cloud if you got hacked) and they even have contingency plans just in case something was to go awry.

Yes, these people have a particular set of skills (had to make a Taken reference, sorry), some of which may surprise you that you already have. Looks like after reading this, it might be time for that career change you were always thinking about.

So, we’ll be going over the mysterious shadow group in the sky, the masterminds powering your crippling addiction, and as usual, we’ll tackle what, who, how, and if you can join the ranks without having to live off a steady diet of ramen noodles to get a degree.

man talking on phone in front of window — Sir, I do cloud computing, that does not mean I have control over the weather.
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Sky of Architects

To answer the question, you may be asking about the big group of people in the sky (where again your information does not go) the people that make like Scarface and put this thing together are the all-mighty Cloud Architects (I’m going to refer to them as CA for short).

But before you can understand what they are, you first have to understand what cloud architecture is. Cloud architecture is a group of resources and services provided by a cloud provider that is structured in such a way as to work in tandem with one another.

These professionals handle everything running in the cloud and at times handle everything running around it. There are times when they may have to be the developer, negotiator, and consultant so in short, this role wears many hats, again at times they might be wearing several at once.

This role is not to be confused with Cloud Engineers, the difference is engineers focus on the day-to-day operation of the cloud architecture, and the architects focus on the creation of the infrastructure and providing possible solutions for the future of the organization’s cloud.

With so much on the line, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a CA who doesn’t like to have a little coffee in their system to keep focused. A little Java anyone?

young woman mapping out an idea — The one to overview the many…a six-figure salary just means I’m never off the clock.
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Jack of all Clouds

Who uses these Jack of all trades players? Almost everyone, thing, or company you can think of is using a Cloud Architect to build, manage, monitor, and even keep up to date their cloud operation.

There’s not one business (unless it’s brand new and does not have the capital) that isn’t or hasn’t moved to the cloud. Being a CA is such a hot career that its demand is the highest in the world.

This makes sense seeing the number of skills you must have in your toolbox and the number of interactions that you must have throughout the creation and maintenance of the architecture. What are some of these interactions you ask?

Well, if you could imagine going back and forth with DevOps engineers, software developers, and whatever third-party vendor brought on to help deliver final projects that solve organizations’ cloud computing needs.

So, yeah CAs talk to and are wanted by a lot of people. Pimping out that cloud baby.

man seated looking at laptop — After five cups of coffee, three bathroom breaks, and screaming match between me and the monitor, the EC2 instance is finally connects.
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Cloud Before and After

Let’s take a trip back in time before the cloud was even thought of (fun fact, the cloud has been around since the 60s, just not to the extent that we have today), before if you were to start or have a business running, you would have to go out and acquire a space then get your hands on the hardware, software, and accessories.

Not only with making those large purchases you would also have to hire someone or a team to come in and set up everything for you in order to even get your business to run virtually. You would have to worry about how large of a space you could rent and where you were going to be able to have your setup.

Then you would have to worry about ventilation to keep your machines cool and running, and storage for when your business becomes larger and starts to house more data. Eventually, you would either have to expand your space which would see you making more purchases or be forced to stall until something comes along.

This is called on-premises or on-prem for short, since cloud computing is around now, there’s no longer a need to seek out hardware or even software. CAs can simply plan and design a cloud adoption strategy that suits your needs.

So, basically, a CA had a hand in everything you use that connects to the cloud.

Person in a field looking upward to the sky — I just connected a load balancer to my instance, why is it still cloudy out here?
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Architect Skyward

So, now you’re probably pondering,” can I get into this job without a degree?” Well, yeah of course if you’re willing to go out and obtain one or more certifications, again multiple held certs better your odds.

This is a grey area and not sure how much I trust it but if someone had any luck with this please feel free to script a comment below about your experience, it is possible for you to get a cloud computing job with no experience.

Again, I haven’t had any luck and I hold a cert with AWS with little experience. Things you’re going to want to know are networking (both computing and actual networking), working knowledge of operating systems, security, and as you could guess a fundamental knowledge of programming language.

Another thing to consider is that being a CA is a challenging and stressful career, I mean you’re dealing with your fellow humans, and humans are stressful enough without the presents of being on the job.

older fellow thinking to himself — These humans’ human too hard.
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Made it this far and found this to be entertaining? Then a big thanks to you and please show your support by cracking a like, scripting a comment, launch a share, or plug-in to follow.

Would like to give sincere thanks to current followers and subscribers, your support and actions mean a lot and has a play in the creation of each script.

Think you have what it takes to be a Cloud Architect?

Script a comment below on what you find interesting about cloud architecture.

Also, if you found this script on cloud to be interesting and would like to read more then check out my script on things I wish I knew before jumping to the cloud.