Google Cloud FinOps Fundamentals

Explore the FinOps triangle, the iron triangle of speed, cost, and quality, and how trade-offs shape cloud deployments, peak versus average workloads, and ROI.

Explore FinOps best practices across inform, optimize, and operate phases, focusing on tagging, cost allocation, forecasted cloud spend for 3–12 months, and real-time dashboards to drive collaboration and value.

Align teams to resources by linking reserved instances to business units, fostering collaboration with executive buy-in, visibility, and chargeback to drive efficiency and innovation in Google Cloud FinOps.

Explore the finops life cycle across the informed, optimized, and operate phases, covering tagging, benchmarking, budgeting, forecasting, and cost optimization for Google Cloud.

Explore FinOps as a cross-functional effort between finance, operations, and DevOps, guided by an inform-optimize-operate life cycle and a triangle of cost and performance tradeoffs.

Identify the FinOps lifecycle phases—inform, optimize, and operate—and note that the optimize phase drives efficiency, with the FinOps team reporting to the CFO and cloud shifting capex to opex.

Explore Google Cloud tools and services, the FinOps framework, and practices for cost optimization, resource management, organizations and projects, billing, tag and label management, and the pricing calculator demo.

Explore Google Cloud FinOps tools and services, from billing insights and BigQuery exports to quotas, labels, reporting, dashboards with Data Studio, and cost-saving recommendations with budgets and alerts.

Explore Google Cloud Resource Manager to organize organizations, projects, folders, and resources. Enforce policies and access controls to mitigate costs, manage tagging, and control API deployment.

Analyze how region and zone selection drives cloud infrastructure costs, highlighting regional cost differences, networking charges, redundancy considerations, and latency trade-offs to manage costs.

Navigate the Google Cloud hierarchy from organization and domain to folders, projects, and resources, and discover how billing accounts linked to projects support FinOps and security.

Organize resources and establish a billing account in Google Cloud to support FinOps, covering compute, API, network, storage, and AI costs, with labeling and a connection strategy across projects.

Explore Google Cloud billing through a practical FinOps demo, learn to navigate the billing console, view costs by project and service, identify discounts, credits, and opportunities for cost optimization.

Discover how to locate updated pricing in the Google Cloud billing console, and read service and skew IDs with unit descriptions like gigabit and gigabyte hour.

Master tag and label management in Google Cloud to support billing and policy, distinguishing labels for billing and tags for network policy, with Compute Engine metadata and project-level labeling.

Explore label management in Google Cloud by viewing, adding, and deleting labels across projects. Use the managed resources tab for resource management and understand labeling at scale.

Use Google Cloud's pricing calculator to estimate service costs, communicate potential expenses to FinOps stakeholders, and follow a straightforward online demo that covers Kubernetes, machine learning, and AI.

Explore the Google Cloud pricing calculator to estimate costs for VMs, disks, networking, GKE, storage, and other services, comparing regions, machine types, OS options, free vs paid, and saving estimates.

Explore Google Cloud FinOps and its people, processes, and technology framework, the epics, and pillars such as accountability, measurement, cost optimization, and planning and forecasting.

Test your understanding of Google Cloud FinOps building blocks, regions and organization hierarchy, and identify key tools like billing exports, cloud hierarchy, and labels and tags.

Manage service costs on Google Cloud by exploring a case study, options, forecasting, and demos across services, while avoiding miscommunication around cloud language and measuring success.

Identify and control Google Cloud costs by understanding pricing models, budgets, alerts, dashboards, and regional differences, while sizing VMs, labeling resources, and applying BigQuery and Kubernetes FinOps best practices.

Identify the customer’s cloud cost pain points and remediate by evaluating compute, GKE, Cloud SQL, and storage usage. Propose shifts to committed use, lifecycle management, budgets, and ROI.

Explore Google Cloud FinOps fundamentals by learning how committed use discounts and reservations secure capacity, select regions and machines, manage vCPUs and memory, and compare reservations with commitments.

Identify storage waste and optimize costs by choosing appropriate regions, zones, and storage classes, then apply lifecycle policies to move data through hot, warm, and cold tiers, and monitor budgets.

Explore how to identify storage waste in Google Cloud Storage by examining costs by service, applying lifecycle rules, labels, and bucket configurations to optimize the FinOps return on investment.

Explore how GKE costs differ by standard vs autopilot, including cluster management fee and per-backend pricing, while using dashboards to visualize CPU, memory, and usage metering.

Learn the BigQuery pricing model, including on-demand and flat-rate options, storage and analysis pricing, free operations, slots, streaming costs, and planning with your team.

Explore Google Cloud data visualization options, from BigQuery and Data Studio for reporting to Data Lab for analysis and machine learning, plus Data Fusion, Data Prep, and Data Flow.

Discover how quotas cap per-project resource usage to minimize costs and prevent overspending across compute, storage, and services, and learn when to contact sales or support to adjust per-region limits.

Close out the course with congratulations and invite ongoing learning in the evolving FinOps and Google Cloud landscape.