At Vantage, our mission is to bring finance and engineering together by empowering every engineer to make smarter cost decisions. We know we have to work with everyone in the community to make faster progress in our mission to evolve FinOps. In light of this, we’re excited to announce that Vantage has joined the FinOps Foundation as a Premier Member! Ben Schaechter, Co-founder and CEO of Vantage, has joined the FinOps Foundation Governing Board.
We are excited to begin this new collaboration to advance the FinOps discipline and help shape the future of cloud cost management. We’ve seen firsthand how organizations struggle to get complete visibility into their cloud spend, both at the vendors we’ve worked for and among the customers of our products. Werner Vogels, the CTO of AWS, highlighted in his AWS re:Invent keynote last year how cost means so much more than just saving money. It’s about truly realizing the efficiency of the cloud. Every organization must consider cost as another non-functional requirement, along with others, like scalability, security, and performance.
The Problem: Increased Complexity and Increased Efficiency Targets
The complexity and sheer scale of cloud environments often leave teams grappling with siloed data, unpredictable costs, and limited visibility into their infrastructure. We’ve maximized what we can from top-down cost optimizations. The devil is now in the details. The best people to find and “debug” cost problems are now engineers—SREs and dev teams everywhere. Engineers can make the right tradeoffs that ensure applications meet customer expectations while cutting out waste.
Engineers need help, though. They just don’t have the right data today, or they are forced to look in a million places across different vendors, or even within the consoles of hyperscalers that have a wide array of their own products. The FOCUS specification is a great foundational part of the puzzle. By normalizing at least some of the cost data schema, we can decrease the friction of getting more data from more providers. We now support the FOCUS specification with the Custom Providers feature we launched earlier this month. With Ben on the Governing Board, we’re excited to collaborate with the FinOps Foundation on more initiatives like FOCUS that help engineers get the data they need to take action.
A Vision for the Future
We’re just getting started. In the coming months, you can expect to see even more from Vantage as we deepen our collaboration with the FinOps Foundation and roll out new features and initiatives designed to make cloud cost management simpler, more efficient, and more impactful.
Our vision is for every organization to have maximum cloud efficiency. We are still a ways away from this being reality. Too many organizations still need to go digging—with spreadsheets, data warehouses, and BI tools in hand—to solve their cost-efficiency problems. We look forward to collaborating with the FinOps community to evolve the practice and bring our vision to reality.
