FinOps Certified Professional
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FinOps Certified Professional
The FinOps Certified Professional course is the most in-depth and hands-on FinOps training available. It is designed for FinOps Practitioners who want to further their knowledge and careers through professional development and accreditation. In this course, students will hone their working-level knowledge of the practice of FinOps and come out prepared to build or lead a FinOps team.
Level: Advanced
Approximate time to complete: 40-50 hours of anticipated work over several weeks
Required Prerequisites: Must have an active FinOps Certified Practitioner Certification, 6+ months of FinOps working experience
Benefits of Taking This Course
- Gain the knowledge needed to build or lead a FinOps team
- Be recognized as an expert in the field of FinOps
- Learn from others who have faced similar challenges
- Develop relationships with other FinOps Practitioners
- Get answers to your unique questions and problems
Who This Course is For
The FinOps Certified Professional Certification is for those who plan to hold a position on a FinOps team or provide FinOps services as consultants or vendors. It is designed for people who work in a FinOps role and want to sharpen their skills through hands-on training with other qualified professionals. This course is not for everyone - it is best suited for those who will be doing the work of a FinOps Practitioner. You should consider this course if you are any of the following:
- FinOps Practitioner (e.g., FinOps Analyst, Director of Cloud Optimization, Manager of Cloud Operations, or Cloud Cost Optimization Data Analyst)
- Cloud Budget Owner
- Cloud Service Provider (e.g., Consultant, Managed Service Provider)
- Support professional who works for a Cloud Service Provider or a FinOps tooling vendor (e.g., Technical Account Manager, Customer Success Services)
- Product Manager who develops FinOps tools for a FinOps tooling vendor
Recommended Prerequisites
- Understand the basics of how cloud computing works and know the key services from your cloud providers, including their common use cases
- Have a basic understanding of consumption-based billing and pay-as-you-go pricing models
- Can describe the basic value proposition of running in cloud
- Have a base level of knowledge of at least one of the three main public cloud providers (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud)
- Be a FinOps Foundation community member
- Have access to Google Workspace (used for shared work during training sessions)
Course Requirements
- Remote Instructor-led Sessions
- Session 1: Attend this class near the beginning of your training, after completing the FinOps Professional Introduction module
- Session 2: Attend this class near the end of your training, after completing all of the self-paced modules
- Self-paced Modules
- Service & Content Requirements
- The service project requirement can be fulfilled with work you do in service of the FinOps community in general, or to its members individually. Examples include:
- Leading or co-leading a Working Group
- Helping to lead the instructor-led FinOps Certified Practitioner course (requires additional approval)
- Presenting at a community event
- Mentoring those within your company about FinOps
- The content contribution requirement can be filled by creating a piece of content for the FinOps Asset Library. Please see the requirements for Contributing Content. Contributions should provide in-depth, insightful, professional-level information that is useful to the community.
- The service project requirement can be fulfilled with work you do in service of the FinOps community in general, or to its members individually. Examples include:
What You Receive With This Course
- Interactive training modules with written content and videos
- 12-month access to course materials and entrance to the exam after completing course requirements
- Two live (remote) classes led by FinOps Foundation staff
- 12-month access to a private Slack channel to collaborate with other students taking the course
- FinOps Certified Professional certificate and badge (upon passing the exam)
After passing the Exam, the FinOps Certified Professional Certification is valid for 36 months.
If you pass the exam, you will be emailed a certificate immediately following the exam, with a unique code in the bottom left corner. This certificate proves that you are a Certified FinOps Professional. Additionally, you will receive a digital FinOps Certified Professional badge to display on your LinkedIn account.
If you have questions, please contact training@finops.org.
FinOps Professional Introduction
This module welcomes you to the course and includes a list of required pre-work.
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.
1.1.0 Team Building & Adoption
This module includes lessons on team building, adoption, and a business case for change.
2.1.0 The FinOps Framework
The FinOps Framework provides the operating model for how to practice it.
2.2.0 Understanding Cloud Usage & Cost
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.
2.2.1 Cost Allocation
It's important to understand Cost Allocation because it is one of the most important of the capabilities within Understand Cloud Usage & Cost domain.
2.2.2 Managing Shared Cost
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
2.2.3 Data Analysis and Showback
Data analysis and showback 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
2.2.4 Data Ingestion & Normalization
Data Ingestion and Normalization is a capability that will be performed first in the Understanding Cloud Usage and Cost domain
2.2.4.1 Multi-Currency
Multi-Currency Normalization is a sub-capability within the capability Data Ingestion and Normalization.
2.3.0 Performance Tracking & Benchmarking Domains
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.
2.3.1 Measuring Unit Costs
Unit Costs are a key way to communicate both the cost and the value of what an organization is doing in cloud.
2.3.2 Forecasting
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.
2.3.3 Budget Management
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.
2.4.0 Real-Time Decision Making Domain
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.
2.4.2 Managing Anomalies
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.
2.5.0 Cloud Usage Optimization Domain
Within this domain, the organization identifies and takes action to match running cloud resources to the actual demand of the workloads running at any given time.
2.5.1 Workload Management & Automation
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.
2.5.2 Resource Utilization & Efficiency
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.
2.5.2.1 Leverage Spot Resources
Spot resources are spare compute capacity offered by the cloud service providers.
33 min
2.5.3 Onboarding Workloads
The Onboarding Workloads capability is about establishing a process to migrate and develop applications in the cloud (included in the FinOps Professional course).
2.5.3.1 Multi-Cloud
This module takes a look at Multi-Cloud.
33 min
2.6.0 Cloud Rate Optimization Domain
Within this domain, the organization works to define its pricing model goals, uses historical data to make pricing model adjustments, and works to manage the pricing aspects of services.
2.6.1 Manage Commitment Based Discounts
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.
2.7.0 Organizational Alignment Domain
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.
2.7.1 Chargeback & IT Finance Integration
Chargeback and IT Finance Integration establishes financial accountability for cloud spend and IT Finance Integration is the ‘forward path’ of cloud spend data through to an organization’s financial management systems.
2.7.2 Cloud Policy & Governance
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.
2.7.2.1 Working with Cloud Service Providers
Understanding the relationships with cloud service providers.
30 min
2.7.3 Establishing FinOps Culture
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.
2.7.4 FinOps Education & Enablement
FinOps Education & Enablement allows all those participating in FinOps practices to increase the business value of cloud by accelerating FinOps adoption.
2.7.5 IT Asset Management Integration
ITAM integration is one of the areas of integration into the organization for FinOps. Organizations with an ITAM function will benefit from having a strong partnership between FinOps practice and ITAM functions.
2.8.0 Translating Services Across Cloud Providers
A look at specific FinOps terminology and tools per cloud provider.
2.8.1 Cloud Billing Mechanics
Cloud Billing Mechanics describes how organizations incur charges for using cloud services, reconcile charges with cloud usage, pay suppliers, and use billing data to optimize the business value of cloud.
2.8.1.1 Azure Billing Mechanics
An overview of Azure billing mechanics including billing hierarchy, billing organization, data structures, and optimizations mechanics.
2.8.1.2 GCP Billing Mechanics
An overview of Google Cloud Provider billing mechanics including GCP resource hierarchy, billing concepts, rate optimizations, detailed usage, and billing data.
37 min
2.8.2 FinOps Assessment
Define and establish the required scoping to execute a FinOps Assessment.
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.
FinOps Certified Professional Certification Service & Content Project
The FinOps Professional Certification requires you to fulfill a service and content project requirement.
FinOps Certified Professional Exam
Final exam for FinOps Professional Certification