Engineering
Primary Goal: Deliver technology solutions that balance cost, speed, and quality to achieve organizational objectives.
The Engineering Persona architects, builds, runs, and supports the technology services that allow organizations to deliver value digitally and intelligently. FinOps provides Engineering teams normalized cost and usage data, which they can use to make decisions about architectures, technology categories, service use, and operations, similarly to how they may use other performance metrics related to resilience or availability. Engineering considers the efficient design and use of resources as they architect, design, and build IT systems. They also are responsible for their use of technology, and perform activities like selecting appropriate resource locations, rightsizing usage to match workloads to resources used, workload management to only run resources when needed, removing unused resources, and monitoring for spending anomalies.
The Engineering Persona can be very broad, incorporating roles that include enterprise and application architects, engineering leads, programmers, developers, SREs, DevOps team members, software engineers, systems engineers, service delivery, engineering managers, platform engineering, and other infrastructure and operations team members.
It is important to note also that anyone who is developing and delivering technology solutions is considered in the Engineering persona. Modern technology platforms, including AI, can enable system development by non-technical people, but those people must fulfill the responsibilities of the Engineering Persona when acting in this role.
Objectives
- Deliver performant and cost effective technology solutions in the right places as quickly as needed.
- Make cost-aware decisions as early in the build process as possible
- Develop cost-effective application / service patterns to standardize over time
- Identify and respond to anomalous spending in technology environments under my control
- Work closely with FinOps, Product, and Leadership to understand technology constraints that will drive decision making
- Use technology effectively in ways that support clear allocation of cost and reduce waste
Challenges
- Dynamic and fast changing technology landscape is challenging to manage
- Mismatch of incentives to develop quickly, add features, and optimize at once
- Lack of visibility to the cost of various technology choices or usage, particularly for consumption-based services like cloud or AI
- Difficult to identify service or application ownership
- Cannot predict the costs closely enough for developing new features and products.
Key Metrics
- Revenue per unit of infrastructure costs
- Cost per deployed service
- Service utilization rates
- Showback & Chargeback of IT costs to the business
FinOps Benefits
- Increased visibility to technology cost closer to real time
- Connection to the value component of unit economics
- Centralized FinOps function shares responsibility for purchasing and discounting components of cost
- Incentive towards solid architecture principles to factor efficiency
FinOps Engineering Persona typical roles:
- Software Engineer/DevOps Engineer
Engineers often have insights into application architecture and resource consumption, which is crucial for FinOps optimization. DevOps engineers, in particular, are often close to the variable costs inherent in platform and cloud infrastructure. - Application Architect / Solutions Architect
Architects have a strong understanding of service options, their costs, and tradeoffs. Architects involved in FinOps can drive cost-effectiveness earlier in the development process, and create well known patterns and automation that aide in reducing waste later. - Data Architect / Data Owner
Architects, designs, and operates data infrastructure for organizations. A common data infrastructure can support a more effective FinOps practice, as well as being critically important for internal data analysis, and AI initiatives. - Enterprise Architect
Develops long-term IT roadmaps, setting enterprise standards, and managing architecture governance. - Systems Administrator / Engineer
Sysadmins often have deep knowledge of cloud infrastructure and cost drivers, which is valuable in FinOps. - Software Architect
Designs the overall structure and architecture of software systems, ensuring scalability, performance, and maintainability. - DevOps Engineer
Bridges the gap between development and operations, automating deployments, managing infrastructure, and ensuring smooth releases. - Data Engineer
Builds and maintains the infrastructure for collecting, storing, and processing large datasets. - AI Engineer
Designs, builds, and deploys AI models and systems. - Data Scientist
Extracts knowledge and insights from data to help organizations make informed decisions and solve complex problems. - Systems Engineer
Designs, implements, and manages complex systems, often involving hardware and software integration.
