FinOps - Certified Professional

Curriculum

FinOps Certified Professional

The certification covers FinOps fundamentals and an overview of key concepts in each of the three sections of the FinOps lifecycle: Inform, Optimize and Operate.

Introduction to the FinOps Professional Course

An overview of the course structure and what to expect. Being part of the FinOps Professional program will help you develop your skills and it'll help you demonstrate the expertise that you've built through your practice it'll help you grow your network and experience and it'll help you most importantly to contribute to the FinOps community.

Business Case Introduction

An introduction of the business case that will be used throughout the FinOps Professional course. Throughout the FinOps Professional course you will use a business case for various activities. This module introduces you to the business case and how to use it.

FinOps Professional Questionnaire and Pre-work

A list of pre-work required prior to registering for first instructor led class.

FinOps Team - Interactive Session One

The first virtual instructor-led session in the FinOps Certified Professional course. This session focuses on the FinOps vision, teams, roadmap, and creating a business case for change.

FinOps Team Building (1.2)

A review of FinOps Team Building covered in the session one instructor led training.

FinOps Adoption Roadmap (1.3)

A review of FinOps Adoption Roadmap.

Framework Overview (2.1)

FinOps is an evolving cloud financial management discipline and cultural practice that brings together people, processes and technology for organizations to understand cloud costs and maximize business value. The FinOps Framework provides the operating model for how to practice it.

Understanding Cloud Usage & Cost (2.2)

Within this Domain, the organization will work to gather all required information about its cloud usage and cost, normalize it, make it available for review, including circulating it to those personas that will use it in other Domains.

Cost Allocation (2.2.1)

It's important to understand Cost Allocation because it is one of the most important of the capabilities within Understand Cloud Usage & Cost domain.

Managing Shared Cost (2.2.2)

This is one of the most important, impactful and central capabilities of any FinOps practice, and one that requires a lot of domain knowledge to do well with the volume and pace of data in cloud, and the consistency required by the end results.

Data Analysis and Showback (2.2.3)

Data analysis and show back is the ability to leverage data, along with metadata on cloud resources and resource hierarchies, to create a near “real time” reporting mechanism for stakeholders.

Data Ingestion & Normalization (2.2.4)

Data Ingestion and Normalization is a capability that will be performed first in the Understanding Cloud Usage and Cost domain.

Performance Tracking & Benchmarking Domains (2.3)

Within this domain, the organization sets and maps its usage and cost to budgets, uses historical information to forecast, and establishes and measures KPIs and other performance indicators, including benchmarking.

Capability - Forecasting (2.3.1)

Forecasting is the practice of predicting future spending, usually based on a combination of historical spending and an evaluation of future plans. understanding how future cloud infrastructure and application lifecycle changes may impact current budgets and influence budget planning and future cloud investment decisions.

Measuring Unit Costs (2.3.2)

Unit Costs are a key way to communicate both the cost and the value of what an organization is doing in cloud.

Budget Management (2.3.3)

Why is Budget management important? It’s no surprise that budgets are used in just about every organization to manage spend. They have been shown to be effective and important over the years in ensuring organizations are managed responsibly.

Real-Time Decision Making Domain (2.4)

This Domain improves stakeholder enablement by curating data in stakeholder-specific contexts, iteratively improving decision velocity and aligning organizational processes to the realities of operating in the cloud.

Managing Anomalies (2.4.2)

Anomalies in the context of FinOps are unpredicted variations (usually increases) in cloud spending that are larger than would be expected given historical spending patterns.

Cloud Usage Optimization Domain (2.5)

Within this domain, the organization works to define its pricing model goals, uses historical data to make pricing model adjustments by buying commitment based discounts, and works to manage the pricing aspects of services it is using in the cloud.

Workload Management & Automation (2.5.1)

This capability may be known by many different names, including elasticity, variable spending, dynamic resource pro/deprovisioning, and so on. No matter the name we associate to this capability, it is one of the primary benefits of cloud and a fundamental aspect of the FinOps practice.

Resource Utilization & Efficiency (2.5.2)

In context to FinOps, resource utilization is about making sure you are getting sufficient business value for the cost. It is necessary to observe a resource’s utilization over time to understand if the performance, availability or other quality metrics are of value for the expense incurred.

Leverage Spot Resources (2.5.2.2)

Spot resources are spare Compute capacity offered by the cloud service providers.

Multi-Cloud (2.5.3.1)

This module takes a look at Multi-Cloud.

Manage Commitment Based Discounts (2.6.1)

Commitment based discounts are discounted rates received on cloud resources in exchange to committing to a certain level of usage over a specific time frame, usually 1 or 3 years. Each cloud vendor has their own set of commitment based discount options, so the specifics of what you’re committing to and the discount you receive will vary depending on the vendor and what type of commitment you make.

Organizational Alignment Domain (2.7)

Within this domain, the organization acts and automates to manage cloud use within the context of other IT Finance activities, and integrates FinOps capabilities with existing organizational processes, organizational units, and technology.

Chargeback & IT Finance Integration (2.7.1)

Chargeback and IT Finance Integration establishes financial accountability for cloud spend IT Finance Integration is the ‘forward path’ of cloud spend data through to an organization’s financial management systems. Chargeback is the ‘feedback path’ of actual spend data from finance systems back to user teams via an internal report or ‘invoice’.

Cloud Policy & Governance (2.7.3)

Cloud Policy is a statement of intent to align cloud-related activity with a standard model designed to improve business value. Cloud Governance is a set of processes by which activity is controlled, so that cloud policy is implemented.

Working with Cloud Service Providers (2.7.3.2)

Understanding the relationships with cloud service providers.

Establishing FinOps Culture (2.7.4)

At its core, FinOps is a cultural movement because the practice of Finops is more than a technology solution or a checklist you hand to your teams. It’s a living, breathing way of approaching the cloud and cloud financial management made possible by the collaboration of finance, engineering and executive leadership through the FinOps Framework.

IT Asset Management Integration (2.7.6)

ITAM integration is one of the areas of integration into the organization for FinOps. Not every organization will have an ITAM function, but those that do will benefit from having a strong partnership between FinOps practice and ITAM functions.

Translating Services Across Cloud Providers (2.8.2)

A look at specific FinOps terminology and tools per cloud provider.

Cloud Billing Mechanics (2.8.4)

Cloud Billing Mechanics describes how organizations incur charges for using their cloud services, reconcile those charges with their cloud usage, pay their suppliers and use the billing data to optimize the business value of cloud.

GCP Billing Mechanics (2.8.4.3)

An overview of Google Cloud Provider (GCP) billing Mechanics including GCP Resource Hierarchy, Billing Concepts, Rate Optimisation, Detailed usage and billing data and References.

FinOps Strategy - Interactive Session Two

The second virtual instructor-led session in the FinOps Professional course. This session covers FinOps Strategy.

FinOps Certified Professional Certification Essay Questions

A collection of three essay questions required to earn FinOps Professional Certification.