15+ Important FinOps Interview Questions

FinOps is mostly the acknowledgment of the fact that using the cloud requires different approaches to traditional infrastructure management.

For the purpose of streamlining cloud vendor management, FinOps combines business, finance, and technology.

FinOps is both a financial and cultural activity; it develops recommended practices for cloud utilization before relying on everyone to assume personal responsibilities.

To better manage cloud vendors, rates, and discounts in a cloud environment, FinOps brings together cross-functional teams of business, finance, and technology.

This replaces the traditional model of discrete, separate procurement teams operating in silos to identify and approve expenses.

A prospective FinOps applicant can present the best case for their next position by being well-prepared.

 

To assist you in preparing for any inquiries you might receive while hunting for your perfect employment, this post will guide you through a number of FinOps interview questions, ranging from simple to difficult.

1. What do you mean by “FinOps“?

The best practices for financial organizations are known as financial operations, or FinOps and they apply to the cloud that houses the data for your business.

When it comes to controlling a company’s financial operations, it symbolizes the meeting point of people, procedures, and technology.

The goal is to maximize your company’s return on cloud investment.

Among other financial management strategies, this can involve haggling prices with your suppliers, monitoring and improving free trials, reviewing licenses and use, and projecting expenses.

FinOps is the technique of adding financial accountability to the cloud’s variable expenditure paradigm, allowing remote teams to trade off speed, cost, and quality for the benefit of the company.

2. What are FinOps’s capabilities?

When FinOps are properly implemented, they do more than just refocus the organization. It offers enterprises a defined set of features for cloud financial management. They consist of the following:

• Right-on cost analysis: FinOps enables businesses to more precisely track where their expenditures are coming from by comparing recent and historical spending to pinpoint the main contributors.
• Improved planning for resources: Understanding what resources an organization will require and when it is essential for effective planning and budgeting. FinOps’ analysis of historical data enables firms to more accurately predict resource utilization for improved planning.
• Making decisions instantly: Businesses need to be able to make exact financial projections and split-second choices in a usage-based cloud environment. FinOps produces real-time data insights that enable firms to react swiftly and precisely.

3. What is the difference between DevOps and FinOps according to you?

Development and operations are combined in DevOps.

It’s a set of procedures and guidelines, along with technologies that have developed to support them, that assist businesses in bringing software to market quickly and with little interruptions.

DevOps is all about automation, dismantling silos, collaboration, and “shifting left,” which refers to actions done to identify and prevent possible software issues early in the development process.

FinOps is a cultural and practice shift, similar to DevOps, enabled by new kinds of tools.

Breaking down silos and collaborating across teams are the first steps. The results, such as enhanced cooperation and communication, are comparable.

The duties involved with FinOps are very different, though.

Software development is the main emphasis of DevOps, but cost management and optimization are the main topics of FinOps.

Engineering and finance work together to make sure there is enough cost visibility to influence better business decisions across the board.

4. What are the main principles of FinOps?

FinOps is significantly reliant on self-governing behavior to encourage accountability and corporate agility because it depends so much on individual ownership and dedication.

In light of this, FinOps is based on a number of fundamental tenets.

• Planning for capacity and resources: Businesses need to be very aware of the resources they have at their disposal and work hard to deploy them wisely.
• Decisions based on business values: Businesses should emphasize value-based measures and unit economics more than overall spending. FinOps encourages deliberate decision-making that frequently involves balancing speed, cost, and quality.
• policy and governing: Businesses that use FinOps must create policies for how they will use all cloud resources. Forecasting will be enhanced by setting clear guidelines for who can utilize particular cloud features and when.
• Using the cloud with shared ownership: Decentralized resource management and optimization place the onus of controlling cloud utilization within predetermined limits on individual feature and product teams.
• Security: FinOps businesses must also be in charge of security-related tasks even though almost all cloud suppliers offer some level of protection. Among other things, this can involve key management, duty segregation, and risk management.
• Centralized administration: FinOps should be led by a centralized team that collaborates with cloud providers to manage cloud finances, even though buy-in must occur throughout the whole enterprise. Other teams can now concentrate on consumption and optimization rather than rates.
• Models of variable costs: Due to the variable costs associated with cloud-based technology, agile, iterative cost planning is significantly more efficient than long-term forecasts. This is seen as a benefit by FinOps since it enables businesses to continuously optimize cloud expenses through ongoing changes and course corrections.
• Collaboration: The cloud’s real-time accessibility necessitates continuing collaboration, continual innovation, and development between the financial and technology teams.

5. What are FinOps’ duties and responsibilities?

The following are the top five roles in a FinOps team:

• Practitioners: Dedicated FinOps practitioners frequently hire credentialed specialists that specialize in FinOps methods. FinOps teams are often led by practitioners, who also oversee corporate-wide initiatives.
• Finance: These people can provide direction and counsel for coordinating FinOps expenditures, cloud budgeting, and cost reductions. This partnership will produce useful financial information suitable for legal business reporting.
• Executives: Any FinOps team should have a member from the business department. These executives are in charge of budgeting and cloud cost prediction.
• Stakeholders: Department heads or project managers in charge of the cloud-deployed software or services are examples of stakeholders. FinOps activities will have a direct impact on their job.
• Engineering: The cloud engineers and architects who build the cloud infrastructure for software and service deployments fall under engineering. These people frequently have the finest technical insight into the potential of public clouds. They are in a good position to provide guidance to the group and translate FinOps efforts into modifications in cloud utilization.

6. What exactly is the FinOps lifecycle?

The FinOps lifecycle can be seen as a continuing three-step process since FinOps adopts an iterative approach to managing cloud money.

Inform

FinOps depends on clear insight into resources, budgeting, benchmarking, and other factors to support organizations’ and teams’ ability to make real-time decisions.

The organization will be better equipped to control cloud expenditures the more informed they are about visibility and allocation.

Optimize

After gathering the necessary data, the firm must now move to cut spending and correctly scale capacity without lowering cloud effectiveness.

Optimization is examining utilization and rates with a critical eye and making the required adjustments.

Operate

Organizations must evaluate efficacy after eliminating extraneous items. They measure cloud capacity’s efficiency, cost, and quality and compare the findings to predetermined benchmarks.

For continuing FinOps optimization, the company repeatedly restarts the cycle as changes are made and tested.

It’s critical to remember that this cycle depends on the team and is not merely self-repeating.

An organization could be in various phases in different departments and at different times.

7. What is your personal experience with a certain public cloud?

A thorough understanding of a particular cloud provider can be necessary for workload designs, deployments, optimizations, and cost management.

For instance, a company using AWS will be interested in learning about a candidate’s familiarity with the resources, services, and pricing associated with that cloud.

If the firm wants to build up FinOps fast, having this understanding might give you an edge over other applicants.

8. Which Department Is in Charge of Finops?

FinOps is distinctive in that it is run by the finance team but affects all the company’s divisions responsible for its financial future, including sales, customer success, the executive team, and external stakeholders like investors.

Projections, revenue recognition, and A/R management are all areas where people from many departments and levels are involved in FinOps.

9. How can cloud cost information be used to make smart business decisions?

In order to examine a candidate’s direct experience, this type of inquiry delves into more detailed FinOps procedures.

Answers frequently compare cloud provider cost reporting to workload performance, availability, and consideration of pooled/available cloud resources and services.

For instance, how is a workload assessed in comparison to its performance and availability goals?

Similar to this, how can cloud expenses be decreased while preserving or enhancing performance and availability to support future growth, such as by using fewer instances or employing committed usage models?

10. How does FinOps enhance a product, service, or industry?

If you have experience with FinOps, potential employers could be interested in learning about the outcomes you have achieved in the past.

They could inquire as to how you have lowered cloud expenses, guided cloud decisions, enhanced workload performance, and reliability, and matched cloud utilization with corporate objectives.

11. What role does your experience in technology (IT) play in FinOps?

FinOps is a combination of knowledge in business, finance, and technology.

A candidate applying for a specific FinOps position will likely have expertise in one or more of these three areas.

Here, the focus is on how specialized expertise in those fields affects FinOps leadership.

Candidates can also demonstrate their ability to work collaboratively by outlining how the specialized expertise of others on the FinOps team might improve FinOps outcomes.

12. What platforms or tools have you employed to power FinOps?

FinOps solutions are widely accessible, including native point products from cloud service providers like the Google Cloud Pricing Calculator, AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Invoices, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure budget alerts.

Native tools often only support the associated cloud provider, thus it could be worthwhile to search elsewhere.

For multi-cloud initiatives, comprehensive FinOps technologies from outside suppliers can handle two or more cloud providers.

Examples of third-party FinOps tools include NetApp Spot, Apptio Cloudability, Flexera, and Neos CloudVane.

It is advantageous if a candidate is already comfortable with the software and hardware that the potential company already employs.

However, common tool skills, including using views and having the ability to budget and forecast, are frequently transferable.

13. How do you plan for capacity and estimate costs for the cloud?

For accurate estimates of cloud expenses and workload needs, which affect future expenditures, FinOps professionals must also be proficient in workload metrics and cloud reporting.

Considerations to scale the deployment and modify budgets could be made, for instance, in the case of a workload with a consistent history of increasing consumption.

A decrease in cloud resources and services to reduce costs might result from declining utilization.

An applicant for a FinOps position should be able to talk about the reporting and data sources utilized in this prediction.

14. How have the results of FinOps been measured?

Numerous metrics are frequently used to assess the efficiency of FinOps. A job applicant should be aware of the significance of monitoring and reporting FinOps outcomes.

Although there isn’t a set of FinOps metrics that is widely acknowledged, there are a number of standard metrics, including allocation, forecasting, and enabling.

Following are some typical FinOps metrics:

Cloud distribution.

This represents a share of overall cloud expenses that are paid by owners of real workloads.

Making sure that cloud charges are connected to actual business needs, such as workloads and departments, is a crucial component of FinOps.

This measure displays the accessibility of the knowledge.

A low percentage indicates that many cloud pricing variables are unknown.

Predicting costs:

This indicator compares actual cloud spending to that which was anticipated. Actual and projected spending are equal as this ratio gets closer to 1, and forecasting is often the most accurate method.

Actual spending is lower than anticipated if this number is less than 1. Spending exceeds expectations when it is bigger than 1.

Ratios that differ from 1 indicate inaccurate forecasting or a lack of billing expertise in either scenario.

Cloud readiness

The proportion of a company’s business leaders who have received FinOps training is represented by this figure.

This indicator gauges the organization’s level of responsibility and FinOps enablement.

A larger proportion indicates greater adoption of FinOps and comprehension of FinOps business outcomes.

15. Do we require any formal education or FinOps certification?

Although formal FinOps training and certification aren’t normally required by employers, they might make a candidate for a FinOps practitioner or other devoted FinOps specialty function stand out from other job seekers.

FinOps Certified Practitioner, FinOps Certified Platform, and FinOps Certified Service Provider are among the training and certification programs offered by the FinOps Foundation.

16. How do you cooperate and operate as a FinOps team member?

The technical know-how of a cloud engineer, the perceptions of a financial expert, and the clarity of project stakeholders can all be helpful to even the most seasoned FinOps practitioner.

This type of conversation aims to discuss collaboration and examine how a candidate establishes a FinOps team and collaborates with others to build a valuable FinOps team.

Without a team, there won’t be buy-in, and FinOps won’t function very effectively.

17. Is FinOps Mostly About Financial Savings?

Savings can be the ultimate consequence of FinOps, but this is not a must.

In many instances, FinOps might also lead to increased spending or an intentional choice to place cost below other factors like delivery time.

FinOps aims to give different stakeholders the insight and cost awareness they require in order to improve business outcomes.

Making money is the main focus of FinOps, according to the FinOps foundation

These strategic choices might be anything from knowing where to make expense reductions to increase overall margins while weathering a company slump to choosing which high-margin items to spend more on marketing.

18. What are the best FinOps methods for controlling cloud spending?

FinOps, as previously said, is a cultural transformation that needs continual support and responsibility across a whole business. 

Here are numerous best practices that can be followed across levels, teams, and departments to assist guarantee FinOps success.

• Remove any unneeded expenses: Cut needless expenditures when they are discovered. FinOps companies must be able to run lean, with little space for superfluous cloud charges.
• Determine where your money is going: Determine which resources are being used by particular apps, teams, and departments. Visibility into existing spending will give a clear starting point for cost reduction without compromising performance.
• Avoid being reliant on a single vendor: Businesses boost their flexibility and provide a wider choice of cloud solutions by collaborating with numerous suppliers.
• Make use of reserved instances: Consider acquiring them for future use as they become available. When compared to on-demand choices, reserved instances are frequently offered at lower pricing.
• Look for and take advantage of sales: While working with a variety of providers might be helpful, certain vendors offer bulk discounts, which can result in considerable savings on cloud services.
• Make use of autoscaling: Use autoscaling settings to automatically alter computing resources to meet current services when workloads are uncertain.

Conclusion

Any business that needs to control cloud expenses can find it useful to adopt a FinOps platform.

Early adoption of the appropriate procedures and guidelines is especially crucial if you foresee your cloud usage expanding shortly.

You can maximize the use of cloud resources and make sure that your cloud-based operations have a clean and dependable data stream by including FinOps into your overall business strategy, which should include your financial modeling and business communications strategies.

Because networking is a tricky topic, one must be careful while answering questions in an interview.

You won’t have any problem passing the interview if you prepare for the questions given above.

You should next proceed in accordance with your objectives. Visit Hashdork’s Interview Series to be ready for interviews.