FinOps X Europe Day 2 – Keynote

Two and a half days of meetings, conversations and deep dive sessions at the FinOps Conference in Barcelona. These are our highlights and main takeaways from the Tuesday Keynote. We also have posts about the Keynote on day one and the session highlights for Day One and Day Two.

Keynote Highlights

After the introduction the keynote started out with a Panel Discussion on Cloud Sustainability. As a fellow Dutchie it’s really cool to see Mathijs Hendriks from Rabobank’s FinOps team on such a big stage. Key points from the panel that I noted down were:

• Primary focus is to get insight into carbon footprint
• How do you get (consistent and useable) data when there are so many data feeds and a “FOCUS for CO2 data” doesn’t exist.
• It’s about introducing a form of accountability for the business
• How to deal with the “cost vs carbon” conflict (cheap could be carbon intensive)? The panel’s recommendation was to try to “shift left” and make this a parameter that is introduced in the decision making process.

Noted challenges for starting to move into the sustainability topic:

• Different datafeeds per CSP
• How to scale down from a corporate goal to a tangible, actionable target for an engineering team
• How to Shift Left –> what do you measure?
• Which parameters do you include or exclude from your calculations?
• What is the Unit of Measure for a parameter and is it consistent across your source data feeds?

The most important quote (for me anyway) from this panel however was:

All this complexity should not stop you from starting. Starting on your sustainability journey is more important than perfection.

Frederic Mingot from Renault Group followed this panel discussion with a presentation on how implementing FinOps principles helped Renault make their Connected Car platform not only sustainable from a business perspective but then helped to drive down the cost per car (hey there, unit economics!) significantly.

Renault was dealing with exploding cost, selling much more “connected cars” than expected and a significantly faster scale up of telemetry date per car than expected.

Implementing FinOps principles helped Renault drive down the cost per message down 24x and the total cost per car by 10x. The savings generated then started acting as a flywheel as they could be reinvested in accelerating the improvement of the platform. As it’s mentioned on the slide in the photo “the apple was larger, cheaper and generally just much better”. Impressive and inspiring to such results on that scale.

This was followed by an equally interesting presentation by Pierre-Emmanuel Nuiry of ST Microelectronics on what steps were taken to move from legacy data feeds to FOCUS based data feeds. The message being that especially for a well established process the switch to FOCUS takes careful planning and consideration.

Key points from this presentation:

• Replay Legacy vs. FOCUS processes until they match
• Recharging information is kept outside of the CSP (not in tags) is it is prone to changes in a fast moving, project driven organization
• For non-native speakers of English there can be literal translation issues (something I’ve ran into myself when doing the FOCUS Analyst certification training), for example on “what does the definition of this column actually mean?”
• There can also be technical translation issues when one column in a legacy format is split up over different columns in FOCUS or when there are differences in the approach to the definition of a certain Unit of Measure

These presentations were followed by a FOCUS Maintainers panel with Shawn Alpay, Karl Kraft Irena Jurica and Larry Advey and company presentations by Amazon and Microsoft. Go and check the keynote when it’s released on the Foundation’s YouTube channel.

We also had the announcement of the FinOps X 2025 dates!