The Future of FinOps: Automation, AI, and Collaboration

FinOps, the financial management practice for cloud resources, has rapidly evolved in recent years. Here at TeraSky, I see three key areas poised for significant advancements:

• Bridging the Operating Gap – Currently, FinOps excels in “informing” and “optimizing” cloud spend. Practitioners, DevOps, and Engineering teams can easily find the necessary information, solutions, or platforms. However, the “operating” phase, which involves taking action on running workloads, is still immature. This phase is much more complicated to manage since it requires changes and actions in production or running workloads infrastructure — actions that can easily affect the company’s customers and service. We will see more platforms offering built-in processes or automation extracting the recommendation to actions. The main challenge will be building the trust of the DevOps and infrastructure leaders that this automation won’t damage the service level or end users of their products.

• The Power of Gen AI —One of the main challenges companies face today is implementing well-known best practices on new workloads and environments. Generative AI will contribute the most to meeting this challenge. Architecture and design, or even the requested output from an application or a service, will be “injected” through a “Gen-AI cost optimization tool.” This tool will implement the best practices on new workloads before deployment and “solve” poor or wrong selection of resources or life cycle policies.

• Collaboration is Key – A good FinOps service covering the entire FinOps Framework requires vast amounts of data and many tools and solutions. Customers can find a solution or platform for each area, such as Visibility, Commitment Management (Reserved Instance and Saving Plan), Storage Utilization, K8s, etc. Selecting the best mix of solutions is very difficult for a single company or internal FinOps team. In this area, the advantage of a partnership with a leading partner or solutions integrator will be significant in successfully meeting KPIs.

FinOps is poised to elevate cloud cost management to a whole new level by embracing automation, AI, and collaboration. At TeraSky, we’re excited to be at the forefront of these advancements, helping our customers optimize their cloud spend and achieve greater efficiency through expert-designed frameworks, well-structured methodologies, and ongoing professional services that never expire.

Written By: Ran Blumenfeld, TeraSky’s FinOps & Customer Success Lead.