My FinOps Collection

Peter Billen
3 min readNov 5, 2024

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In this post, I provide an overview of articles that I have published about FinOps. The aim of this collection is to bring these together in one place and help you navigate appropriately to find the information you are looking for.

Disclaimer: I work at Google in the cloud team. Opinions are my own and not the views of my current employer.

Introduction to FinOps on Google Cloud

This article introduces what Cloud FinOps is and why it is important. It also details how to implement a Cloud FinOps strategy and the role data plays. This is not just a one-time activity, but rather a continuous practice; so we also focus on the need for change management and ensuring that the necessary skills and competencies are available to set up a FinOps team.

Learning more about FinOps on Google Cloud

Continue reading with a list of useful resources to learn more, including whitepapers, dashboards, playbooks, examples and more. These will help you with specific information about a broad range of topics, from strategy to product specifics. The aim of this collection is not to be exhaustive, rather to bring together many materials starting from the basics to helping with dealing with advanced topics.

4 dimensions for driving FinOps adoption

This article presents a simple approach consisting of 4 dimensions to help structure and drive Cloud FinOps adoption. During many presentations and discussions I have realized that teams are looking for options on how to get started or move to a next phase in their FinOps journey. The amount of information, time investment and organizational constraints (for instance structure, processes, priorities) can be overwhelming. The aim is however not to provide an exhaustive framework, rather to offer a pragmatic structure to identify, initiate and follow up on FinOps foundational activities.

A phased approach supporting FinOps adoption

This article aims to provide an easy-to-use approach to facilitate creating and following up your FinOps strategy and action plan. It continues the FinOps adoption topic from the previous blog 4 dimensions for driving FinOps adoption and focuses on continuous improvement, collaboration, and a data-driven approach for long-term success.

Growing your Google Cloud Landing zone with data

When implementing a FinOps strategy, there is a dependency with the foundational cloud activities in your organization. Whether it is about onboarding a new workload, providing cost visibility or alerting teams on unforeseen cloud spend (and much more); the landing zone setup and its governance plays an important role in enabling FinOps processes. And data plays an important role here. This article focuses on the approach for organizing your landing zone and create synergies with your FinOps strategy and adoption.

Improve budget relevance by expanding cost visibility dashboards

In this blogpost, we refresh how you can avoid surprises on your cloud bill by creating budgets and monitoring your charges. But creating budgets is only the first part, how do you make sure they remain relevant and appropriate? It builds on the previous topic and emphasizes the importance of a data enabled landing zone to maintain consistency for your reporting processes.

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Peter Billen
Peter Billen

Written by Peter Billen

Peter is a Principal Architect at Google Cloud. He is helping companies get the most out of their digital transformation while moving to the cloud.