FinOps Cloud Cost Optimisation Workshop: 2 hour

One of the key benefits punted for making the decision to migrate to the Cloud, is the cost saving assurance. Yet many organisations find themselves with costs that are spiralling out of control with little to no understanding of their makeup and opportunities to save. In our free 2 hour workshop seasoned FinOps facilitators will use the principles of FinOps to show you how to effectively manage your Azure Cloud costs using Cost Explorer and Cost Management and Power BI, which are freely available to you in the Azure Portal. FinOps is the operating model for the Azure cloud - a combination of systems, best practices to increase an organisations understanding, management and optimisation of their cloud costs. The fundamental principle of FinOps is to reduce wastage through creating visibility of Azure spend, taking advantage of the variable cost model and aligning costs to business value Vaxowave is a certified FinOps Service Provider and was the first in Africa to become a FinOps Foundation member.
In the workshop participants will be taught:

1. Evolution of the tech cycle from on-premise to Azure Cloud
2. Basic understanding of FinOps and understanding the need for FinOps to effectively manage your Azure Cloud costs
3. The Principles, Considerations and Challenges of FinOps
4. Requirements to build a strong FinOps team to manage Azure Costs
5. Functions and responsibilities of the FinOps Team
6. Benefits of FinOps
7. Practical example: How to FinOps a. Understand fully loaded Cloud costs, by analysing Cost Explorer reports from the Azure portal - b. Benchmark Performance using the Power BI application made available by Microsoft c. Enable real-time decision making based on analysis of Vulcan reports d. Optimise usage & rates by for example purchasing Reserved Instances of Azure Cloud where applicable e. Align plans to business value to ensure your business is future ready and you can operate your hybrid cloud seamlessly. How does this align to business value? •Be future ready: Capabilities you need today but more added continuously to meet your needs tomorrow and beyond. Finops provides timely and consistent usage data to all stakeholder to enable real-time decision making, thus ensuring that you can add more capacity whilst also understanding the impact of the decision •Build on your terms: Developers can build with the frameworks, languages, tools, and Open Source software they want. Finops provides continuous monitoring of the financial implications of the decisions which are made and the operational impact. Provides a safety net to identify any rogue spending to minimise unwanted costs due to control failures and therefore allows developers to build responsibly and avoid any surprises in billing •Operate hybrid seamlessly: Seamlessly operate technology on-premises, in the cloud, and sitting on Edge devices. FinOps enables you to find and remove under-utilised services and optimise the use of all resources, by enabling right-sizing and workload management and calculating and realising the benefit of re-purchasing capacity in Azure •Trust your cloud: Build and deploy on a platform you can trust - secure and compliant. FinOps advocates for tag strategy which improves compliance. It designs a framework of decision making that aligns with the business drivers, monitors spend by tracking and trending analysis and requires ongoing reviews with stakeholders on organisation opportunities