[en] How to get the FinOps Certified Practitioner — FOCP certification?

Nicolás Lecaros Marchant
5 min readDec 31, 2023

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Introduction

At its core, FinOps is a cultural practice. It’s how teams manage their cloud costs, where everyone takes ownership of their cloud usage backed by a core set of best practices. Cross-functional engineering, finance, product, etc. teams. They work together to enable faster product delivery while gaining more financial control and predictability.

Sounds great doesn’t it? 😊

So be careful, your company could be paying for things you don’t need, tools that no one uses, and worse yet, you could be increasing costs exponentially if you don’t take concrete action and end up paying more than you paid on premise.

So let’s get started!

What is FinOps?

It is an operational framework and cultural change that unites technology, finance and business to foster financial responsibility and increase business value through migration to the cloud.

• FinOps enables companies to increase financial accountability and maximize business value.

• FinOps helps understand the complexity and challenges of traditional IT financial management.

• FinOps helps identify the building blocks and key success metrics to increase business value.

From finops.org we can see the official definition:

FinOps is an evolving cloud financial management discipline and cultural practice that enables organizations to realize maximum business value by helping engineering, finance, technology, and business teams collaborate on data-driven spending decisions.”

Who is this certification for?

The FinOps Certified Practitioner (FOCP) enables individuals in a wide variety of technology, finance, and cloud roles to validate their FinOps knowledge and enhance their professional credibility. The certification is designed for senior professionals who want a basic understanding of FinOps and how it is applied to improve the business value of cloud spend. Organizations undergoing a public cloud-first strategy or in the midst of a public cloud migration will also benefit greatly.

About this certification

The certification covers the fundamentals of FinOps and an overview of key concepts in each of the three sections of the FinOps lifecycle: inform, optimize, and operate.

What it shows when you get it

A FinOps professional certificate will bring a solid understanding of FinOps, its principles, capabilities, and how to support and manage the FinOps lifecycle to manage cloud costs and usage in your organization.

Domains and Competencies

The certification exam evaluates the following domains and competencies.

Cloud Challenge 8%
- Understand the challenges of working with the cloud
- Recognize the differences between cloud and traditional IT

What is FinOps and FinOps Principles 12%
- Define FinOps
- Understand each of the FinOps Principles

FinOps teams and motivation 12%
- Describe the skills, roles and responsibilities of a FinOps team
- Describe where a FinOps team would be located
- Understand what drives the size, position and composition of a FinOps team

FinOps Capabilities 28%
- Understand the six pillars of FinOps capabilities
- Describe the activities associated with each capability

FinOps Lifecycle 30%
- Describe the FinOps life cycle, its phases and purpose
- Understand the basic processes that FinOps teams implement in the FinOps lifecycle

Terminology and the Cloud Billing 10%
- Understand basic cloud, FinOps, DevOps and finance terminology
- Describe the characteristics of cloud invoices

Exam details

It will test your basic knowledge of FinOps and its practice.

Available in English language.

It costs 300 USD and you can buy it from: https://learn.finops.org/

A passing grade is 75% and the certification is valid for 24 months.

The exam is 1 hour long, 50 multiple choice questions, unproctored, and you will have two retries if you don’t pass the first time.

My experience

After reading and studying all the FinOps information from the official website I decided to venture out and take the exam, but I must confess that I did not pass on my first attempt 😞.

I did not have time to be able to correctly answer the 50 questions in the 60 minutes that the exam lasts.

The good news is that the purchase of the exam includes 2 free re-attempts, but still do not trust yourself and study accordingly, I read of cases of people who did not pass in the 3 attempts.

Although the information is very complete from the official FinOps website, we must consider that many of the questions are real situations in the world of work that seek to see how you would act as part of a FinOps team, so if you do not have the experience . Even with this framework you must build it through study.

For this I recommend reading, studying and understanding the book Cloud FinOps that is available digitally from O’Reilly with its first official version and also its second version in review format.

(Cloud FinOps is also available to purchase the paperback book through Amazon)

Once the above was done, I made my next attempt and was able to pass the exam without problems. 🥳

I simultaneously received an email with the certificate.

👍 Much success in your exam. Let me know with a 👏 if this article helped you and tell me if you passed the exam.

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Nicolás Lecaros Marchant

I write about #googlecloudplatform, #amazonwebservices and #microsoftazure.