Joe Daly, Director of Community at the FinOps Foundation, joins the pod to discuss his FinOps journey, tackling cloud molehills before they become mountains and his top picks for a Scottish FinOps playlist.

This episode was recorded in late 2021 whilst Joe was in his previous role as Director of Cloud Optimization at Nationwide USA.

As an accountant by training, Joe approaches FinOps from a financial, rather than developer, background and took his first FinOps related role as Manager of Cloud Cost Optimisation at Cardinal Health back in 2016 - showing that the need for FinOps has been growing for a long time in Cloud computing terms!

“I’m not a technical engineer by training, I’m a tax accountant by training…that grew into a FinOps position pretty naturally”.

Joe understands that the benefits of cloud can be a double edged sword - its agility and its accessibility are what causes it to be a pain. Similarly, whilst conversations within businesses about the value of cloud often come down to cost reduction Joe argues that this is the wrong approach to long term value: “FinOPs should be leading you to driving value…cost control is often the entryway to FinOps but it’s not the end goal”.

• Savings means ‘I can reduce your budget’ (budget line item which can be removed)
• Cost avoidance - avoidance of future expense 
• Value - means different things for different people in different companies. 

Cloud value is a combination of performance, execution and savings but is ultimately in the eye of your customer - what do they find valuable, what improved their experience?

Finally, Joe talks about why more non-developers should join the FinOps Foundation, particularly why he would love to see more procurement professionals join the Foundation as procurement is a huge part of the public cloud: “When you’re in the public cloud every engineer has just become a procurement professional”.

Connect with Joe on LinkedIn

About the hosts

Aled Sage (VP Engineering at Cloudsoft) brings 20 years of experience developing distributed applications, mostly in the enterprise sector. Particular areas of interest include devops, automation, cloud, concurrency and distributed systems.

Connect with Aled

Alasdair Hodge (Principal Engineer and Solutions Architect at Cloudsoft) is a leading
authority in cloud, software applications and automation across all major cloud platforms, he has been engaged in the design and optimisation of cloud services in banking and finance.

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About Cloudsoft

Cloudsoft specialise in applications, automation and the cloud. Our top-down, application-centric approach is what sets us apart and empowers our customers to tame their IT estates and drive real business value.

Our public cloud IT transformation expertise is embedded our Tempo cloud services, helping our clients to transform faster and exploit the benefits of cloud. We’re an active contributor to the Apache Brooklyn open source project, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner with Well-Architected, Microsoft Workloads, DevOps Competencies, a FinOps Foundation Member and a FinOps Certified Service Provider.

Our flagship AMP software is a Digital Platform Conductor, enabling customers in Banking, Defence and other heavily regulated industries to cut through the complexity of their estates. and maximise value from their technology investments, drive down costs and reduce risks.