FunOps - Organising a FinOps hackathon

I wrote about this topic before. I’m doing it again as I truly believe putting the fun in FinOps should be part of the increasing engagement with teams across an organisation. As I was always intrigued by the idea of doing something fun around FinOps I was waiting for the right opportunity. I read a book that you can find on Amazon about FinOps Hackaton. SPOILER ALERT: It is not worth reading keep your money in your pocket and use your brain between your ears! I was hoping to lend some work here but in the end you needed to pay for all the valuable stuff. The book was dirty cheap the material was dirty expensive… I could have known. So I warned you!

Time for the backdrop of what we organised. I say - we. As I could not have done this without the relentless support from my colleagues. The backdrop is a company struggling with 3 things. First Visibility, second a saving potential worth pursuing and third an exec buy-in but an operational lack of execution.

The Visibility challenge

You cannot control what you cannot see so visibility comes in many forms. In cloud we all know tagging is your cornerstone to build your FinOps house on. If you don’t have (a good) visibility you will never be able to move your FinOps practice anywhere. So we needed to tackle this… and quickly!

Cost Savings challenge

When you are in a multi-cloud world and you don’t have visibility you also don’t know who owns savings. Tools give you an output of savings however if you are unable to give these savings a home you are up for a challenge.

Execution Complexities

Although we have a big buy-in from the highest level in the company. The operational level was not aware of any activities apart from receiving tickets and executing them. An extra complexity is that the operations teams are not part of the company but 3rd parties doing the instructed things through a process so the enablement education on the topic at hand is very limited. They do have liaisons between the organisation and the operators.

That’s the background for the rest of the story. As I’m part of the newly started FinOps team we could only accept the challenge and make the best out of it. the information above was something we learned between week 1 and week 4 after starting. In week 5 we had our first stereo where I presented what we have seen, done over the past month. As I’m the program manager of this FinOps practice I was taking the stage and prepared the slide deck together with my counterparts in the team. The team was scratching their head on how to tackle the challenge ahead. At that moment I thought back to my Fun in FinOps blog and brought the idea of a FinOps hackathon to the group.

What if we propose a FinOps hackathon to the execs, we focus on our challenges and try to overcome them or at least give it a big push in the right direction

I got some questions on how we would approach this. Underneath you will find some questions I got with the answers.

How will we handle the savings?

We will be starting a logbook on savings. It is our first approach of creating a central place of savings. We will be able to use this in the next stereo’s but also to start a report on this and create a working cadence.

What about tagging? We don’t have a tagging strategy that is helping us to create visibility.

We’ll get agreement on the tagging. We will work in different waves to get these things done. The first wave will be the hardest and from that moment on we will be able to work with what is out there to streamline an refine the lines further. In our hackathon we focus the first wave and on the automation of the tags.

How do we get the engineers to pick-up on this?

That’s where the enablement comes in. We need to bring in a cadence of communication both in newsletters then training sessions. We will use this cadence to help people understand the FinOps work further. The hackathon will be the first success story and we need to bring this a poster child for good housekeeping of cloud expense.

Once I had the buy-in I needed to put this in slides as a good story towards the executive committee that was taking part in the steerco. The package was pretty simple…

For us, the FinOps team, this is a big bet however we think it is the first domino piece that will drop multiple other domino pieces. It will help us with cloud visibility, will fuel the reporting ecosystem, will impact the cost of cloud, will drive buying decision later on for our saving plans and reserved instances. We will get rid of orphaned resources and thus increase the value of cloud for our organisation and last but not least it will impact the culture as we will work with a more extensive network of people that will all drive changes on 1 day. We will reward the winners with a price and we will advertise this as good behaviour hoping to inspire more teams or at least smoothen the conversation when we want to get in touch with them.

After our steerco we received executive sponsorship. The real work started now and then. Putting a date on our schedule in one month and a half we could use the momentum of the monthly steerco to push things a bit more and we could use the time to prepare…

In the next blog I’ll deep dive on the preparation of this FinOps Hackaton!