Managing cloud costs has become a key challenge as many organizations struggle with the complexities of tracking costs and having the insight into spending. In addition to this, the shift-left movement has placed more procurement responsibility on the engineers’ workload which means that CFOs often rely on them to interpret cloud spend.

In this episode of TFiR Let’s Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Roi Ravhon, CEO and Co-Founder at Finout, to discuss bringing finance and DevOps closer in order to better track expenses and the key benefits their FinOps dashboards will bring. He discusses how the evolution towards cloud and Kubernetes has presented new complexities and why Finout feels it has the solution to bridge the gap.

Key highlights from this video interview are:

• Ravhon comes from a background as an engineering director for Logz.io and a major part of what he did was being accountable for the company’s cloud spend. It became clear during this role that it was becoming increasingly complex to track costs and have the insight into which specific customer or department the spending could be attributed to. He explains how this led to him to create Finout.
• Finout has closed its Series A funding having raised $8.5 million. Ravhon explains that the company’s main motivation is to build up the company so that it can tackle the problems companies are facing with managing cloud costs. He discusses their unique offering and why the market needs it.
• Finout created a highly customizable widget system that can be applied to FinOps dashboards with the ability to create unit economics directly to every widget. Ravhon discusses how this means that companies can stop measuring how much money is spent on AWS or GCP and instead you can measure the money spent per transaction, event, or per click. He explains the benefits this can bring.
• The FinOps dashboards work by companies creating their own set of filters, group-bys, and visualization across their cloud providers and services. Each widget has the capability to have its own visualization types and it can be applied with global filters too. Ravhon goes into detail about the benefits of the FinOps dashboards.
• Ravhon believes that there is a significant push towards shifting everything left. However, with the developer taking on more responsibilities, CFOs do not always have the information on how much money they are spending across the organization, and have to rely on engineers to interpret their cloud spend. He explains how FinOps fills that gap and how it can benefit both CFOs and engineers.
• Cloud cost is often the second biggest cost after salaries; however, while it is possible to reduce staff and see immediate cost reductions, this is a short-term solution. Ravhon feels that being able to show that you have a healthy margin and being accountable for what the company is doing is a better approach for companies as they weather possible economic downturns.
• While Kubernetes presents numerous new opportunities, it also brings with it complexities such as a problem with managing costs. There are many startups working to optimize, operate, and troubleshoot Kubernetes clusters as developers start to realize the potential for flexibility, yet there are still complexities to work out.

Connect with Roi Ravhon (LinkedIn)
Learn more about Finout (Twitter)