5 Core Pillars Of Cloud FinOps

01 December 2022

The current dynamic business environment requires companies to take a structured, proactive approach to manage, monitoring and predicting their cloud service costs.

Doing so will help them to meet their financial goals. Cloud FinOps is a cultural shift and operational framework that brings finance, business, and technology together to accelerate business value realization and drive financial accountability through the cloud.

At its heart, cloud FinOps enables businesses to understand the challenges and complexities of cloud information technology (IT) financial management. The core purpose of cloud FinOps is to optimize the business value generated from cloud services. It involves various techniques, like free credits, least-priced services, negotiating costs, and more.

5 Core Pillars of Cloud FinOps

You need to know the core principles of the cloud FinOps design to successfully implement it. These design principles help build a cost-conscious, self-governing culture while fostering business agility and financial accountability in the cloud.

The following are some key pillars of Cloud FinOps:

1. Enablement and Accountability

This principle focuses on creating lean or centralized cross-functional teams. These teams may include application owners, architecture, operations, finance, and engineering. Establishing these teams enhances governance and sets guidelines for managing cloud expenditure.

2. Cost Optimization

This principle requires stakeholders to identify the main cost-optimization drivers in the cloud environment. It is a continuous, iterative process that offers a consistent solution to managing cloud usage most cost-effectively.

The following are the three common optimization areas:

Architecture
Pricing
Resource

3. Realization and Measurement

This principle involves creating core key performance indicators (KPIs), and business-value metrics will be utilized to evaluate the success of the transformation. In most cases, customers begin with a series of cost-optimization metrics. Afterward, business value or unit economics measurements, like cost per customer served or transaction.

4. Forecasting and Planning

Proper cloud estimates and planning require the company to fully understand its cost drivers, assign cloud expenditure, and benchmark efficiency. Doing so ensures minimal deviations between the actual and forecasted costs.

5. Accelerators and Tools

As you would expect, cloud FinOps requires you to employ proper accelerators and relevant tools. Doing so ensures effective monitoring and management of cloud spending.

These tools may include:

Automation scripts that set budget alerts and account guardrails

Reporting dashboard for tracking value and managing cloud spend

Cost management tools for analyzing real-time cost and billing data.

How Do Cloud FinOps Work?

This operational framework involves a three-step lifecycle to ensure teams remain focused on and organized to deliver business value and attain financial accountability.

These steps include:

Informing
Optimizing
Operation

1. Informing

This stage involves informing the company about all cloud-related costs. It happens by providing 100% visibility and assigning cloud costs to relevant business units. Here, the goal is to let every team understand their cloud spending.

Also, it involves benchmarking against the company’s internal objectives, like budgets and forecasts. Companies can visualize areas they’re attaining business value and where they do not, helping them determine their progress.

2. Optimizing

Once members know the organization’s goals, costs, and achieved business value, they proceed to optimize costs. This step involves providing recommendations and actionable insights to the different teams.

Here, companies cut off unnecessary services that increase their cloud spending. Also, they automate rightsizing of different resources and maximize the utilization of the available resources. As a result, it significantly reduces cloud expenditure.

3. Operation

Once all costs are optimized, it’s time to architect the cloud environment to achieve and maintain minimal cloud spending. The company creates governance policies that help attain technological, business, and financial goals. The primary objective here is to achieve measurable goals and continual improvement.

4 Benefits Of Cloud FinOps:

Adopting cloud FinOps best processes and practices helps enterprises achieve various high-level benefits, such as:

1. Cost Efficiency

Cloud FinOps enable you to attain cost efficiency thanks to advanced tools and accelerators. These tools help you identify areas of optimization, track and optimize cloud spending, and hold every team responsible, reducing unnecessary cloud costs.

2. Positive Cultural Shift

By holding every cloud consumer responsible and making their data on cloud usage and spending available, cloud FinOps helps optimize cloud consumption. As a result, it helps create a beneficial culture for all cloud-consuming parties.

3. Reduces Uninformed Decisions

Uninformed decisions can be extremely costly. Without proper tracking of cloud spending and resources, your company may be spending significant resources on the cloud. Fortunately, cloud FinOps products provide real-time granular reports and insights, helping leaders to:

Get service-level cloud utilization

Track underutilized or idle resources

Compare the business cloud resource usage by time

Figure out business areas that need more resources.

With such data, leaders are aware of which areas need what resources. Also, they are informed about their decisions’ financial implications.

4. Unifies the Company’s Ecosystem

Every company often has a frustrating, complex, and invisible culture split between finance, IT, and DevOps teams. Requests, approvals, and processes vary from department to department, though they aim to achieve a common goal.

Also, technical terms and jargon may not be understood by other teams. What’s more, the finance team often loses control of cloud infrastructure procurement when the cloud engineering team steps into the process.

How does Cloud FinOps help in this case? Well, cloud FinOps help every team stay updated about their cloud costs depending upon their responsibilities.

For instance, while the finance team views the cost reports and data, the engineering team can access the processor usage information. As a result, it leads to streamlined, effective, and unified operations.

Challenges Of FinOps

Although cloud FinOps is a great approach, it has its shortcomings. Many teams end up experiencing barriers to attaining business value.

Some key challenges include:

Difficulty understanding cloud costs
One cannot trade off creativity and innovation for low cloud costs
The DevOps teams may not exhaustively understand the financial processes

Final Thoughts

The cloud FinOps framework can significantly transform your company in all aspects. This operational framework enables you to optimize your company’s financial wellness while driving business value.

However, to achieve the best results, you need to adopt the best practices and understand the principles and dynamics of this approach.

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Arnab

Arnab is a professional blogger, having an enormous interest in writing blogs and other jones of calligraphies. In terms of his professional commitments, He carries out sharing sentient blogs.

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Best Practices For Visual Regression Testing On Cloud

Visual regression testing is the software testing process that is used to test your software application by visually finding any error or malfunctioning in the user experience. Visual regression testing ensures that an application or website maintains its intended look and behavior. It confirms the absence of any unplanned alterations to its visual design or functionality. This procedure entails comparing a reference version of the application or website and its current version, aiming to identify any visual disparities. Visual regression testing in a Cloud-based platform is the latest trend in the field of software testing and automation testing. It has various advantages, such as it increases the testing scope, costs less, and it increases testing flexibility. In this article, you will see the concepts of visual regression testing on the cloud, best practices for it, and many such things. What is Visual Regression Testing Visual regression testing evaluates the impact of code changes on the user experience by comparing screenshots before and after execution. It's also recognized as visual snapshot tests or visual testing, and its primary objective is to uphold visual consistency following updates. The Function Of The Visual Regression Testing Visual testing validates the suitability of an application's user interface in terms of its visual attributes. This quality assurance process aims to confirm the accurate display of content and data on the application's front end. In case you're not acquainted with the concept of Regression testing, its purpose is to ensure that any modifications made to the software do not disrupt any previously functioning elements. In the context of visuals, this testing guarantees that alterations to the software do not lead to style-related problems. The true capability of visual regression testing can be leveraged with Cloud-based AI-powered test orchestration and execution platforms like LambdaTest. It allows the running of visual testing across a large farm of 3000+ real device and OS combinations. This helps to ensure cross platforms compatibility on the visual appearance and interface of the software applications. Features Offered By The Cloud-Based Ai-Powered Test Orchestration And Execution Platform - Lambdatest For Robust Visual Regression Testing Are As Follows: This section discusses the features which are offered by the test orchestration and the execution platform. Execute Selenium and Cypress tests across a range of programming languages, such as Java, NodeJS, C#, Python, and StoryBook. This empowers the delivery of flawlessly designed applications across almost any browser or device. Employ Mis-match Ignore feature of SmartUI's Status Bar so that you can tackle the complexities of visual differentiations. This capability allows testers to crop the status bar out from the screenshots. Leveraging the high-end technique of image processing, it accurately detects and eliminates the status bar. This facilitates the analysis of essential UI components with due focus. Effortlessly install, set up, and execute the LambdaTest NPM package. This enables the direct implementation of the JS scriptsStorybook via our NPM CLI. Conduct regression testing, the visual ones for your mobile apps on genuine devices. Assure visual uniformity with precise pixel-to-pixel comparisons against your reference point, encompassing various screen sizes, resolutions, and layouts. Best Practices for Visual Regression Testing on Cloud Let us see the practices a tester must follow while performing visual regression testing on a cloud-based platform like LambdaTest. Following these practices during the test automation will make your software application visually more powerful and efficient. 1. Tool Selection: Choosing the appropriate tool to perform visual regression testing on the LambdaTest is one of the most important and essential steps in moving ahead of the testing process. Various parameters should be kept in mind during the tool selection for testing automation, such as the software type, compatibility aspects, resolution, etc. LambdaTest integrates with various tools like Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, and others, using which you can perform visual regression testing. 2. Consistent Environment: Never forget to create a conducive setup that will facilitate cloud-based visual regression testing. The interface provided by using these environments allows you to examine the visual outcomes and input received during the testing process. The testing team has the ability to pause the visual regression testing procedure and make the necessary corrections. The team conducting the testing should also maintain resource isolation for the environment. It aids in preventing any type of intervention during automation testing, which increases the effectiveness and productivity of cloud-based visual regression testing. 3. Isolation And External Factors: Remember that the isolated environment should not be affected by any external factors. They include network latency or fluctuations, system updates, or background processes running on the testing machine. These factors may lead to visual error and malfunctioning of the software application. External influences can potentially introduce visual errors and cause malfunctions in the software application. Ensuring a controlled environment by addressing the factors safeguards the accuracy of the testing results. All the screenshots and visual reports of the testing process will be saved in that specific folder. This will help to perform visual comparisons effectively. 4. Scriptless Test Cases Visual regression testing on the cloud platform using scriptless test cases is the best approach. Since numerous cloud-based AI tools are available, test automation can be utilized to develop test cases simultaneously. It is because the testing scope of a programmed test case is limited. But using AI technologies offered by LambdaTest for test case design opens up possibilities for the testing team to consistently cover the testing scope. It will perform visual testing against some test cases, and again, it will recreate the test cases according to the previous result and analysis. This practice will bring the best visual result for your software application. 5. Documentation Of Visual Test Cases Documentation is a very effective and important practice in any software testing process. In visual regression testing, you need to test and verify the components visually, and here it is important to mark down your observations, bugs, and analysis and work on them accordingly. For your visual regression tests performed in LambdaTest, you should create clear and succinct test cases and descriptions. You should also include comments or annotations to describe the aim and scope of your baselines and screenshots. Additionally, you should preserve and maintain your screenshots and baselines using a version control system or a cloud-based service. Sharing and communicating with the client will help you understand their demand and make the best possible result. 6. Updating The Baseline Updating the baseline is a very crucial step in the visual regression testing process when performed in LambdaTest. It consists of the practice of taking the feedback result and analyzing them. If the result is considerable, you can approve this update in the baseline. And if you think that it is not worth consideration, you can simply reject them. But you need to mention all these in the baseline. It is because this will help you in the future because you can see all your testing logs in the baseline. Mention the changes that were done intentionally, their reasons, and such things. It will also help all the team members have an overview of the changes that are going on in the software testing process. 6. Optimize Testing Coverage And Scope Always remember to prioritize the testing scope for each component, specifically when executing visual regression testing in cloud platforms like LambdaTest. The high-priority components must be paid more attention, and they should be executed with high precision. Use the concept of full-page and component-based screenshots to compare the changes visually by the testing team. Using this practice in visual regression testing will help achieve a better UI experience and enhance the testing results. You can use some advanced features like custom attributes. These attributes help find the elements separately during visual regression testing. Also, you can use the trigger events and DOM concept. These will help to perform the screenshot comparison effectively. 7. Performing Parallel Testing Apart from this, you can leverage parallel test execution in performing visual regression testing in LambdaTest. Executing parallel testing is what makes visual regression testing productive and effective, though, along with those other factors. 8. Learn From Failure It is the final practice that all testers must follow to perform visual regression testing on the cloud and during test automation. Learn from your previous failure. Document the mistakes that you have made previously. Write down the tool feedback and in which specific tool you got some issues performing the testing process. And learn from these highlights. Make your testing goal and work on your failures. This will bring the best result for your software application. Also, it will help in the overall development of the organization as well as the individual tester. 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The Versatility of Clover POS Systems

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5 Core Pillars Of Cloud FinOps