The FinOps Community wants your contributions to the FinOps Foundation’s open source Resource Library.
FinOps is an evolving discipline and cultural practice that reflects the practices of FinOps practitioners everywhere! The input you provide as practitioners and professionals managing cloud are the FinOps stories and real world experiences that allow us to build, illustrate, validate and refine the FinOps Framework. Every FinOps practice is unique because every organization’s cloud use is unique.
Community contributions can range from general to very specific, focusing on one specific practice or covering many. We encourage everyone in the community to contribute to the FinOps body of knowledge to help educate fellow members of our community and give other practitioners lessons learned from your perspective. By looking at FinOps practice from many perspectives, the Technical Advisory Committee and content teams can provide a varied and rich set of suggested best practices, and can constantly validate and refine FinOps core concepts.
We want to hear from a wide range of voices in our FinOps community. We are always looking for user stories from any type of FinOps practitioner or FinOps-adjacent personas, including:
The best way to contribute is often to become involved in a FinOps Foundation Working Group or Special Interest Group. These groups meet in a structured way to deliver content collaboratively. You can visit the Working Group page to learn more about what Working Groups and Special Interest Groups are active.
You may also contribute individually in the form of
Stories are opinionated, anecdotal, and experiential FinOps guidance by our community constituents of various personas. These stories represent real-world experiences of our community members, distilled into a shareable format.
These stories should focus on a FinOps lesson learned or a problem solved, including details of how they came to their solution or conclusion.
Your story can cover single event, a single practice over time, or may cover a few capabilities together. We’d encourage you to keep each story short and focused.
Ideal length: 4-6 paragraphs, including media that supports the story. Imagine: short blog post!
TITLE: High-level description of the lesson learned or problem solved:
How <our company> allocates multi-cloud container costs back to its teams…
RECOMMENDED SECTIONS TO INCLUDE:
NOTE: User stories may include references to Cloud Service Providers or products used to navigate FinOps challenges, but cannot pitch, recommend or sell any product or service. Especially if the tool was essential to solving your problem, you should name it, but stay away from making testimonials.
Playbooks or User Guides are rich and detailed examples of how you or your FinOps practice perform one or more FinOps processes or Capabilities. These contributions are a deeper dive into how you or some company performs the specific steps, assesses the performance, engages the organization, or produces the result.
Playbooks should be an informative example providing real-world references for other practitioners looking to shape their own practices. Examples might include detailed procedures, RACI models, automation scripts, policy documents, FinOps strategy documents, or examples of documented business cases.
Playbooks or user guides can be focused on a specific process or Capability or might cover multiple related Capabilities. They should be a How To… illustration of a working process or function. They should be focused, with a beginning, middle and end and focus on a specific Capability or Capabilities.
Ideal length: 2+ pages or more, including media or data that supports the story. Imagine: Multi-page strategy document.
TITLE: High-level description of the function or capability
How <our company> triages, distributes, resolves, and reports upon the impact of Anomalies detected in cloud xxx…
RECOMMENDED SECTIONS TO INCLUDE:
NOTE: User Guides and Playbooks are encouraged to include references to Cloud Service Providers, Products or Tools used, but please do not pitch, recommend or sell any product or service. Especially if the tool was essential to solving your problem, you should name it, but stay away from making testimonials.
The FinOps Framework is ever evolving, and the information published about the Domains, Capabilities, Personas and Concepts are open to contribution. FinOps Framework Updates are suggested updates to the Capability, Domain or other Framework content on the site currently.
Framework updates may be simple suggestions to correct phrasing or something simple (these can be best suggested by using the “Make Suggestion” button at the top right of each page) or they may be more comprehensive suggestion, such as adding a new section, a new KPI, a new input or the like.
Framework updates will typically be considered when they materially improve the completeness, accuracy, or clarity of the description. Contributions should help anyone reading the content understand more clearly how that aspect of FinOps can be performed.
Ideal length: a few lines to a few paragraphs. Imagine: Commentary and suggested correction or addition
Another important discipline FinOps intersects with would be the IT Security department, which should be detailed as follows…
RECOMMENDED SECTIONS TO INCLUDE:
NOTE: FinOps Framework content strives to be cloud, vendor, and organization neutral in almost all cases unless specific references are required to illustrate concepts. So please try to follow this guideline in your contribution.
The FinOps Foundation community can contribute content discussing or debating FinOps practice. These contributions might be assets you or your organization have created that represent or champion FinOps best practices and resonate with the FinOps Foundation Framework.
Please do not submit Product or tool content, demos, or sales pitches. Ideal content here is targeted at specific FinOps practitioners or FinOps-adjacent personas designed to help them understand, perform, or master FinOps concepts.
These contributions can include references to specific clouds, products, tools, or practices, but should not be promotional or recommend individual products. Contributions should be aligned with the FinOps Foundation Framework and not be contradictory or confusing by using other concepts.
Submission examples include:
The FinOps Foundation may add qualifying contributions to our resource library to share and amplify awareness of the work with our greater community.
NOTE: Be sure to have permission (marketing, PR, legal, product, or etc.) to share content with the FinOps Foundation prior to submitting content.
No matter where it comes from, all content contributions will be reviewed by FinOps Foundation staff or designated reviewers. We’ll select and add content depending on how they help us address or improve the following:
We may use only part of what you contribute. We might combine it with other contributions. We might not be able to use it for a variety of reasons right now. Or ever. What we do use we’ll attribute to you, if we are able to and you allow it.
At the top of many of the pages on the FinOps.org website, you will see a button that says “Make Suggestion…”. If your contribution is very short, you can enter it right there on that form! Put in your contact info so our staff can reach out if they have any questions.
You may compose any of the contributions described on this page into an email, and forward it to Hello@FinOps.org. Put “Content Contribution” into the Subject line, and include all the other information requested.
If you’re in the FinOps Foundation Slack, please head to the #Framework channel and submit your idea or contribution there. Or just ask a question, or give us feedback.
We hope this guidance is useful. We can’t wait to see your amazing content idea or contribution!