FinOps is evolving into a vital function. Businesses increasingly hire and dedicate staff to FinOps duties, creating new job opportunities for cost-savvy technologists in almost any cloud software development and deployment scenario.
While questions vary dramatically in any interview setting, most FinOps interview questions relate to experience in finance, IT technologies, cloud cost management and optimization, FinOps tools and FinOps team dynamics. An interview may start with several warmup questions such as, “What is FinOps?” or “What are the key principles of FinOps?” But conversations can quickly become more nuanced and detailed. Consider these typical FinOps interview questions below.
1. How does FinOps differ from everyday financial management?
Traditional financial management focuses on tasks such as budgeting and capital investments over a long-term and usually static view. FinOps focuses on cloud planning and costs as a recurring operational expense. It provides continuous, real-time visibility to meet the dynamic demands of enterprise workloads, and it benefits from flexible budgeting and regular iteration and optimization in response to changing cloud costs and opportunities. Conventional financial models don’t apply well to FinOps approaches.
2. What’s your experience with a specific public cloud?
Workload architectures, deployments, optimizations and cost control can require extensive knowledge of specific cloud providers. For example, a business that uses AWS wants to hear about a candidate’s expertise with AWS cloud resources, services and costs. Organizations that engage other cloud providers want to hear about specific expertise with those clouds. This detailed knowledge can provide an advantage over other candidates if the employer seeks to ramp up FinOps quickly.
3. How does FinOps improve a product, service or business?
Prospective employers may want to delve into candidates’ expertise to learn about FinOps results they have produced in the past. They may want to know how candidates have used FinOps to reduce cloud costs, drive cloud decisions, improve workload performance and resilience, and match cloud use with business goals. Job seekers with tangible experiences to share can demonstrate their experience and abilities with constructive examples of proven successes.
4. How do you translate cloud cost data into beneficial business decisions?
This kind of question gets into more specific FinOps practices to discuss a candidate’s direct experience. Answers typically contrast cost reporting from cloud providers against workload performance, availability and a consideration of pooled/available cloud resources and services.
For example, how is a workload evaluated against its expectations for performance and availability? Similarly, how can cloud costs be reduced, such as through smaller instances or committed use models, while maintaining or improving performance and availability to accommodate future growth? This discussion often involves the use of tools, metrics and KPIs in the decision-making process.
FinOps is an amalgam of finance, business and technical know-how. A candidate who competes for a dedicated FinOps role will likely bring a skill set from one or more of these three domains.
5. How does your technical IT background support your role in FinOps?
FinOps is an amalgam of finance, business and technical know-how. A candidate who competes for a dedicated FinOps role will likely bring a skill set from one or more of these three domains. The discussion here focuses on how specific knowledge in those domains influences FinOps leadership. Candidates can also display collaborative savvy by discussing how specific knowledge from the FinOps team can bolster results.
6. How do you handle cloud cost projection and capacity planning?
FinOps experts must be able to use workload metrics and cloud reporting to produce reliable forecasts of cloud costs and workload requirements, which influence future costs. For example, a workload that consistently grows might result in recommendations to scale the deployment and adjust budgets accordingly. Falling usage might prompt a reduction in cloud resources and services to optimize costs. A FinOps candidate should be able to discuss the reporting and data sources used in such forecasting.
Cost and capacity planning are deeply rooted in techniques such as tagging and cost allocation. Tagging enables FinOps practitioners to assign labels or categories to myriad different elements across the cloud portfolio, such as resources, services and cloud apps. Tagging is critical for cost visibility and management, such as watching capacity or budget planning. Cost allocation then enables FinOps teams to organize and assign tagged costs to varied users, teams or departments around the enterprise. Cost allocation is typically a line item or expense charged against that team’s budget.
For example, a cloud computing instance might be tagged “Test Server” and “Project Epsilon,” enabling FinOps teams to readily relate the instance to both software development and the specific software team working on the project.
7. Why is reserved instance management important for FinOps?
Candidates should be able to discuss common discount strategies as a core means of cloud cost management. Reserved Instances (RIs) are an AWS offering that enables cloud users to purchase cloud resources over a longer term at rates below on-demand pricing. Azure shares the RI terminology and offers an alternative Savings Plan built around a fixed hourly spend. Committed use discounts are Google Cloud’s approach to long-term discounts. All three approaches bring considerable cost savings for long-term, predictable workloads.
8. What tools or platforms have you used to drive FinOps?
This question is a more generic examination of a candidate’s experience with FinOps software. There are many FinOps tools available, including native point tools from cloud providers, such as Google Cloud Cost Management, Google Cloud’s pricing calculator, AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, Azure invoices, Azure Cost Management and Billing, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure budget alerts. Because native tools typically support only the related cloud provider, it might be worth looking beyond them.
Comprehensive FinOps tools from third-party vendors can support multi-cloud strategies for two or more cloud providers. Third-party FinOps tool examples include VMware Tanzu CloudHealth, IBM Kubecost, Apptio IBM Cloudability, Flexera, Neos CloudVane and Spot by NetApp. It’s helpful if a candidate is already familiar with the tools and platforms the prospective employer uses. But general tool skills, such as using views, budgeting and forecasting capabilities, are often transferrable.
Review popular FinOps tools.
9. How have you measured FinOps results?
The effectiveness of FinOps is typically measured by a variety of metrics. A job candidate should understand the importance of tracking and reporting FinOps results. Although there is no universally accepted suite of FinOps metrics, several common measures exist, such as allocation, forecasting and enablement. The following are some important metrics:
Cloud allocation. This is a percentage of total cloud costs allocated to workload owners. A key part of FinOps is ensuring all cloud costs are related to business purposes, such as workloads and departments. This metric shows how much of that insight is available. A low percentage means that many cloud costs are undefined.
Cloud enablement. This percentage represents the number of an organization’s business leaders trained in FinOps. This metric measures the level of FinOps accountability and enablement present in the business. A higher percentage means more FinOps acceptance and understanding of FinOps business results.
Cost forecasting. This metric considers actual cloud spending versus the amount planned. As this ratio approaches 1, the actual and planned spends are closer to equal — and forecasting is generally the most accurate. If this figure is less than 1, actual spending is lower than forecast. When it is greater than 1, spending is higher than forecast. In either case, ratios that deviate from 1 mean inaccuracies in forecasting or gaps in billing knowledge.
Cost optimization. FinOps is about optimizing costs, not simply cutting them. The cost optimization metric provides a ratio of total cloud services optimized versus total cloud services used. At 1, meaning 100%, all cloud resources and services are cost-optimized.
Recommendations implemented. Tools provide recommendations for cost control and optimizations. This metric measures the number of recommendations from tools provided versus the total number implemented. Using a larger portion of those recommendations represents a greater familiarity and effectiveness of those tools in managing cloud costs.
Other recognized cloud metrics or KPIs include factors such as resource utilization rate, RI utilization, cost per customer, allocated cloud spend and percentage of wasted spend.
10. How do you collaborate and work as part of a FinOps team?
Even the most seasoned FinOps practitioner can benefit from the technical knowledge of a cloud engineer, the insights of a financial expert and the clarity of project stakeholders. This kind of discussion is intended to address teamwork and explore the ways a candidate forms a FinOps team. If there’s no team, there’s no buy-in — and FinOps doesn’t work well, if at all.
11. Do you have any formal training or certification in FinOps?
While employers don’t typically require it, formal FinOps training and certification could help a candidate for FinOps practitioner or another dedicated FinOps specialty role stand out from other applicants. The FinOps Foundation provides training and certification programs, including FinOps Certified Practitioner, FinOps Certified Platform and FinOps Certified Service Provider.
Despite rising in popularity, full-time professional roles as dedicated FinOps practitioners and team leaders are still scarce. FinOps roles are frequently tailored to specific organizational needs and combined with other areas of professional specialization, such as software development, finance or IT/cloud engineering. Consequently, candidates who hope to broaden their career through a FinOps certification might still be responsible for other duties or areas of expertise. Before sitting for that important interview, remember to brush up on other professional or technical areas that might extend beyond FinOps topics.
12. What are some common challenges you’ve seen with FinOps?
Several common challenges plague FinOps implementation and ongoing cloud cost management efforts. Common challenges include the following:
Complex cloud billing. Cloud provider bills can be stunningly complex, with thousands of line items that can be difficult to allocate directly from the bill itself to specific teams, projects or departments. Suitable FinOps tools and proven cost management tactics can vastly enhance FinOps’ understanding of the bill.
Problems with tool selection, use and interoperability. Evaluate and select FinOps software, whether from third-party or native cloud providers, like any enterprise software. It must be clear, usable, well supported and affordable, as well as support the organization’s FinOps needs and often interoperate with other enterprise applications. Better validation and selection strategies help mitigate such issues.
Cultural resistance to centralization with specific accountability. The idea that a centralized team can allocate costs and organize cloud resources — yet make individual teams or departments accountable for that cloud spend — can often meet with cultural resistance. Education and clear examples of FinOps benefits to the business can be vital for allaying fears and building organizational support for FinOps.
Poor visibility or inconsistent tagging. Tools aren’t magic; the visibility and detail they provide are only as good as the care and consistency used in tagging and other data organization. Admins can’t see costs or know where those costs belong without proper tagging. Establishing sound tagging policies and training users on those policies can improve tagging practices and enable tools to provide better visibility into cloud costs for fair and complete cloud cost allocation.
Don’t forget to brush up on the basics
Before entering a FinOps interview, take a minute to brush up on the basics.
FinOps is not a single thing, but rather a business culture that blends financial management and business practices intended to drive value by helping cross-disciplinary teams, including engineering, finance and business teams, collaborate on cloud spending decisions and take responsibility for the business outcomes of those decisions.
FinOps focuses on six key principles intended to optimize the business value of cloud computing. Those six principles are the following:
Collaboration. Cross-disciplinary teams work closely together to select cost-effective cloud resources and architectures.
Responsibility. Cloud teams and users accept accountability for cloud usage.
Centralization. The collaborative FinOps team represents a centralized body that supports and facilitates cost-effective best practices.
Reporting. Careful and frequent review of metrics enables the FinOps team to track costs and improve cloud value to the business.
Value. Businesses can balance cloud costs with tangible business benefits and innovate.
Opportunity. Real-time visibility can lead to new opportunities for design efficiency and better cloud utilization.
FinOps provides several benefits for cloud cost management.
What are FinOps roles and responsibilities?
These are the five principal roles, or personas, involved in a FinOps team:
Practitioners. Dedicated FinOps practitioners are usually certified professionals with dedicated expertise in FinOps practices. Practitioners frequently head FinOps teams and drive initiatives across the business.
Executives. The business side of an organization should seek representation in any FinOps team. These are the executives responsible for budgets and cloud cost forecasting.
Stakeholders. Stakeholders include department heads or project managers responsible for the software or services deployed to the cloud. FinOps efforts directly affect their work.
Finance. These individuals can offer guidance and advice for aligning cloud budgets, FinOps spending and cost optimizations. This collaboration yields meaningful financial data that is suitable for compliant business reporting.
Engineering. Engineering includes the cloud engineers and architects that construct cloud infrastructure for software and service deployments. These individuals often have the best technical perspective on public cloud capabilities. They are well positioned to advise the team and translate FinOps efforts into changes in cloud usage.
Editor’s note: This article was updated to reflect changes in the best practices for preparing for a FinOps interview.
Stephen J. Bigelow, senior technology editor at TechTarget, has more than 30 years of technical writing experience in the PC and technology industry.
