Integrated FinOps Role for Cost Management

In our June 2023 release, we added support for a new turnkey role in the Rafay Kubernetes Operations Platform specifically targeted at users in a FinOps function.

This new role allows the FinOps team to access and view cost and usage data in the Rafay Kubernetes Operations Platform. Users with this role do not have the ability to impact infrastructure or applications.

Background

Pretty much every enterprise customer we work with either already has an established FinOps function or is in the process of setting this up. At a macro level, these organizations see the FinOps function as a means to manage their infrastructure and cloud spend.

This function has evolved to become the center of gravity for data-driven spending decisions forcing collaboration across engineering, finance, technology and business teams.

FinOps provides the means to integrate financial accountability directly into application teams. They can be made responsible not just for delivering code, operating the code, securing the code, but also for managing its ‘fixed and variable’ costs. The ultimate goal is to create incentives to ensure that the application team’s processes include consideration of costs as well.

FinOps Role

We find most organizations start their FinOps journey by having a centralized FinOps team that reports to the CFO. These users do not have any responsibilities related to infrastructure or application operations. Shown below is the profile for a user logged in with a FinOps role.

Users with the FinOps role can perform the following tasks:

Org Wide Cost Metrics

These users have “read-only” access to cost metrics for the entire org i.e. single pane of glass.

Create Charge Back Groups

These users can create and manage charge back/show back groups allowing the aggregation of cost data based on a logical set of resources used by an application etc.

Generate Charge Back Reports

These users can generate charge back/show back reports (periodically or on-demand) based on configured charge back groups.

Create & Assign Cost Management Tags to Projects

These users can configure and specify cost allocation tags to projects. Once tags are specified at a project level, they are automatically inherited and assigned to all resources in the project.

Next Steps

Customers tell us that some of the biggest advantages with Rafay’s approach to cost management are:

1. There is no additional software to install, configure and maintain
2. Data is available in context i.e. users do not have to login into yet another console just for tasks related to cost management

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