CFP closed at  May 14, 2019 23:05 UTC
  (Local)

Who will attend CloudyCon? CloudyCon will deliver real word stories, expertise, and inspiration for and by FinOps leaders and practitioners - all aimed at helping the community member and their teams become better at cloud financial management.

Who are we looking for? FinOps is about breaking down silos between the formerly disparate groups who now need to work together to manage cloud spend efficiently. As such, we are looking for a diverse group of FinOps practitioners, technology leaders, business executives, technical procurement, cloud financial analysts, cloud economists, and finance operations professionals who have played a role in their organizations journey in adopting the cloud.

Who puts on CloudyCon? CloudyCon is a conference put on by Cloudability as the first FinOps conference in the world. Cloudability is partnering with the FinOps Foundation to drive FinOps best practices content for the event. It has also invited the FinOps Foundation to provide a vendor-agnostic certification on FinOps at the conference.

CFP Description

What are we looking for in a talk? We are looking for sessions that range from how-to information for beginners to advanced topics for experts; from cultural topics to FinOps; and everything in between. The audience will consist of cloud engineers, principal architects, CIOs, IT managers, finance managers, CTOs, procurement managers and others in the FinOps space. What would you like to talk about at CloudyCon?

The FinOps journey consists of three iterative phases - Inform, Optimize, Operate.

We are looking for talks on FinOps Fundamentals and each of the three phases:

Cultural Shift and the FinOps Team

  • Sample talk ideas:
  • Building a FinOps practice in the enterprise
  • Understanding motivations for each group and what they need to solve
  • Defining the cross-functional team
  • Team competencies needed
  • Where does the FinOps team sit in the organization
  • Cultural changes - managing to the budgets and targets
  • Setting goals and KPIs for the FinOps team
  • Lean Culture / Cost Aware Service Operations

Inform Phase: Visibility and Allocation

  • Sample talk ideas:
  • The Prius effect: Transparency and the feedback loop of real time data
  • Benchmarking teams performance
  • Encoding your allocation strategy
  • Understanding cost drivers
  • Forecasting spend and tracking teams to budgets
  • Allocation strategies: Chargeback and Showback
  • Containers cost visibility and optimization
  • Serverless cost visibility and optimization

Optimize Phase: Adjusting to hit goals

  • Sample talk ideas:
  • Reserved Instance or Committed Use Discount strategies
  • Rightsizing best practices and workflows
  • Metrics-driven cost optimization: Taking the right actions depending on your goals
  • Defining the metrics and KPIs for optimization
  • Setting targets: setting budgets based on historic forecasts and modeling business inputs
  • Carrot vs the stick approach: encouraging good citizens and working with bad ones
  • Importance of executive mandate
  • Motivating engineering teams to take action

Operate: Aligning teams to business goals

  • Sample talk ideas:
  • Automating cost governance processes
  • Enabling teams to make the best possible decisions (The Iron Triangle: good, fast, cheap)
  • Unit economics: defining metrics that are meaningful to the entire organization
  • What governance and enforcement permissions should you set?
  • Aligning shared goals between IT, Finance and the Business
  • Finding the balance between Cost Optimization vs Business Product Development: being too focused on growth vs too focused on cost
  • Minimizing time through the FinOps loop

A talk could focus on any experiences in these areas or across multiple areas.

Inform | This is the first phase in the FinOps journey, empowering organizations and teams with visibility, allocation, benchmarking, budgeting and forecasting. The on-demand and elastic nature of cloud, along with customized pricing and discounts, makes it necessary for accurate and timely visibility for intelligent decisions. Accurate allocation of cloud spend based on tags, accounts or business mappings enable accurate chargeback and showback. Business and financial stakeholders also want to ensure they are driving ROI while staying within budget and accurately forecasting spend, avoiding surprises. Benchmarking as a cohort and against teams provides organizations the necessary metrics to develop a high performing team.

Optimize | Once organizations and teams are empowered, they need to optimize their cloud footprint. Cloud providers offer multiple levers to optimize. On-demand capacity is the most expensive. To encourage advanced reservation planning and increased commitment, cloud providers offer discounts for commitments which typically involves complex calculations for making reservations (Reserved Instances (RI) / Committed Use Discounts (CUD - Google Cloud). In addition, teams and organizations can optimize the environment by rightsizing and automating turning off any wasteful use of resources.

Operate | Organizations start to continuously evaluate business objectives and the metrics they are tracking against those objectives, and how they are trending. Measure business alignment on speed, quality and cost. Any organizational success is only possible if the organization builds a culture of FinOps which involves a Cloud Cost Center of Excellence built around business, financial and operational stakeholders who also define the appropriate governance.