FinOps X Europe Day One – Session Highlights

In this overview we highlight sessions that we’ve visited during the conference. Overall the quality of the sessions has been very high and from speaking with a lot of other attendees we got many more recommendations for sessions to catch on the FinOps Foundation‘s Youtube channel when they get released. Chalk Talks or “Ask the Expert” sessions were not recorded as they are intended to be interactive.

Ask the Expert: Microsoft products and solutions for FinOps

A very busy session (we were over maximum capacity) with a lot of questions (logically) focusing on the new FinOps Hubs / FinOps Toolkit. Michael Flanakin, Ritesh Kini and Arthur Clares (with help from Jimin Li who came in after participating in the keynote panel discussion) did their best to answer the questions from the group, showed some of the upcoming capabilities of Copilot in cost management and teased some features that are coming in version 0.7. If you want to take a look at the current capabilities then go to Microsoft’s Github: https://microsoft.github.io/finops-toolkit/

AI for FinOps – Integrating GenAI with Infrastructure as Code

A.I. was another major topic, but rather than allowing it to steal the spotlight as a trendy buzzword, the discussions were grounded in its practical connection to FinOps. The focus was on how AI can improve FinOps practices, enhancing efficiency, reducing costs, and improving decision-making processes. At the same time, there was an emphasis on how FinOps strategies can amplify the value of AI initiatives, ensuring businesses get the most out of their investments. By keeping the spotlight on FinOps and its real-world applications, the event avoided hype and provided meaningful insights into how these two areas can work together to deliver real results. For example, the people from the Warner Leisure Hotels (Rich Young and Madoc Batters) showed how they leveraged generative A.I. with Infrastructure as code, effectively integrating FinOps best practices with their IT infrastructure deployments.

Chalk Talk: Unit Economics & Quantify the Business Value Domain

Bhavna Halai & Nilofar (Nilofar Zazwala) Bhurawala expertly moderated this interactive workshop about unit economics. There was great input from a lot of attendees and we had really interesting exchanges in our smaller workgroup as we had different fields represented from Cloud SaaS to Building Materials and (eCommerce) Retail that each come with their own challenges on unit economics.

There were too many learning points to list but some highlights were:

• Choose the metric wisely and put a lot of effort in determining the right metric for your business as well as making sure that the underlying math makes sense. Sometimes there is an obvious link to from your cloud spend to your product but often the link is not that clear.
• Make sure that the metric or KPI is stable and resilient. If there are big swings in the metric, like we had in one of the workshopped cases, it’s probably not a good metric.
• Be mindful of adoption of the metric and the implications of “shining a light onto a dark spot”.
• Get the basics (tagging, structures, hierarchies etc.) in order.

Public Sector: Challenge Accepted!

Day 1 of the conference went out with a blast with a session of Jan C. Simons of RheinEnergie AG, showing the challenges of the public sector on successfully contracting cloud services partners in line with E.U. regulations, while at the same time ensuring cloud cost control using FinOps capabilities.