FinOps Certified Practitioner Questions With Complete
Solutions
3 OKR Focus Areas Correct Answers 1) Credibility:
implementing transparency from the end user all the way down
to the code, scheduling regular spend updates at whatever
granularity the shareholder requires, have consistency between
what FinOps reports and what their accountants will report to
them at the end of the month.
2) Sustainability: tie application name, application owner, and
business group to each resource and automating routine, time-
consuming tasks like chargeback.
3) Control: establish control while also enabling speed, increase
tag compliance rate, establish chargeback for cloud and
container usage, and to automate compliance policies.
Allocation Options of the Big Three Correct Answers [insert
table 9-1 from page 101]
amortized costs Correct Answers divides out the initial
payment of a service attributing the prorated cost for each hour
of billing
As your team moves into the Optimize phase, your focus moves
to making decisions in near real time, identifying anomalies, and
spending efficiently. What is a good first goal in this phase?
Correct Answers Good cost allocation.
Automation tips Correct Answers - Use it in an inform mode
first
- Building confidence in the automation
,- Do plenty of testing
- Don't build it all yourself
- Measure the performance
AWS Reserved Instances Correct Answers Reservations are
available for EC2 instances, RDS databases, Redshift nodes,
Elasticache nodes, Elasticsearch nodes, and DynamoDB
reserved capacity.
RIs are often thought of as a percentage discount applied to your
resource's cost. It is also correct to say the RI has a fixed rate
that's a certain amount cheaper than the on-demand rate at
purchase. While this might sound like the same thing, it's
important to understand that if AWS reduces the on-demand
rate, your existing RI rates remain the same (although analysis
of historic AWS price drops show that the on-demand rate
doesn't drop enough to undercut the three-year RI price).
AWS RI: Linked Account Affinity Correct Answers When
you purchase RIs at the master payer account, they can apply to
any accounts within the same AWS Organization. However,
they have an affinity to the local account they belong within,
meaning the RIs purchased in a specific will first be made
available to the resources in that account. If it doesn't "match"
anything in that account, it will apply to a matching usage for
any other account in the same organization.
RI sharing can be disabled, meaning any RIs within that account
will not apply a discount outside of the account, and if it doesn't
match, it won't get applied.
,AWS RI: Standard vs Convertible Correct Answers Solely for
EC2 instances, a more flexible option, the Convertible Reserved
Instance (CRI) is available. No matter what, cannot reduce
overall commitment to AWS, but can exchange reservations for
others.
AWS Savings Plans Correct Answers Compute Savings Plans:
apply broadly across EC2 and Fargate compute, offering savings
comparable to convertible RIs, apply more widely than a
convertible RI, even across regions.
EC2 Instance Savings Plans: apply to compute that matches
compute usage more specifically, applying to a single family in
a single region; more restrictive, but higher discounts and less
restrictive than a standard RI.
Azure RIs: Correct Answers - purchased for an Azure regions,
virtual machine type, and term (one year or three years)
- not as specific as AWS operating system or availability zone
- can be exchanged across any region and any series, but the
change must be requested via a support form (not
programmatically)
- can only be assigned to one subscription (account) so they
don't float like they do in AWS
- all upfront payment is required
- instance size flexibility is fully functional
basic format of billing data Correct Answers - time period
- amount of the resource used
- rate details used for the charge during that period
- where in the world it is located by region
- the resource ID
, - metadata attributes that can be used to allocate the spend to a
product
blended rates Correct Answers standardized rate paid for the
same resource by evenly distributing the charges to each
resource
CapEx vs OpEx Correct Answers capitalized expense vs
operation expense
If an organization writes a check to acquire something, does that
acquisition benefit future periods? If it does, it's capitalized
expense; if not, it's operational expense (expended in this period
with no future benefit)
Chapter 1: What Is FinOps? conclusion Correct Answers -
FinOps is about collaboration between all teams inside an
organization.
- Everyone has a part to play and should become cost-aware.
- The core principles of FinOps should be the foundation of all
processes around cloud financial management.
- Real-time reporting gauges your current spend and
optimizations.
- Data-driven processes are key to an organization becoming
cost-efficient.
- Business decisions can accelerate and match the rate of cloud
resource decisions.
Chapter 10: Adjusting to Hit Goals conclusion Correct Answers
- The optimize phase is not always about reducing costs -- it's
about spending efficiently.
Solutions
3 OKR Focus Areas Correct Answers 1) Credibility:
implementing transparency from the end user all the way down
to the code, scheduling regular spend updates at whatever
granularity the shareholder requires, have consistency between
what FinOps reports and what their accountants will report to
them at the end of the month.
2) Sustainability: tie application name, application owner, and
business group to each resource and automating routine, time-
consuming tasks like chargeback.
3) Control: establish control while also enabling speed, increase
tag compliance rate, establish chargeback for cloud and
container usage, and to automate compliance policies.
Allocation Options of the Big Three Correct Answers [insert
table 9-1 from page 101]
amortized costs Correct Answers divides out the initial
payment of a service attributing the prorated cost for each hour
of billing
As your team moves into the Optimize phase, your focus moves
to making decisions in near real time, identifying anomalies, and
spending efficiently. What is a good first goal in this phase?
Correct Answers Good cost allocation.
Automation tips Correct Answers - Use it in an inform mode
first
- Building confidence in the automation
,- Do plenty of testing
- Don't build it all yourself
- Measure the performance
AWS Reserved Instances Correct Answers Reservations are
available for EC2 instances, RDS databases, Redshift nodes,
Elasticache nodes, Elasticsearch nodes, and DynamoDB
reserved capacity.
RIs are often thought of as a percentage discount applied to your
resource's cost. It is also correct to say the RI has a fixed rate
that's a certain amount cheaper than the on-demand rate at
purchase. While this might sound like the same thing, it's
important to understand that if AWS reduces the on-demand
rate, your existing RI rates remain the same (although analysis
of historic AWS price drops show that the on-demand rate
doesn't drop enough to undercut the three-year RI price).
AWS RI: Linked Account Affinity Correct Answers When
you purchase RIs at the master payer account, they can apply to
any accounts within the same AWS Organization. However,
they have an affinity to the local account they belong within,
meaning the RIs purchased in a specific will first be made
available to the resources in that account. If it doesn't "match"
anything in that account, it will apply to a matching usage for
any other account in the same organization.
RI sharing can be disabled, meaning any RIs within that account
will not apply a discount outside of the account, and if it doesn't
match, it won't get applied.
,AWS RI: Standard vs Convertible Correct Answers Solely for
EC2 instances, a more flexible option, the Convertible Reserved
Instance (CRI) is available. No matter what, cannot reduce
overall commitment to AWS, but can exchange reservations for
others.
AWS Savings Plans Correct Answers Compute Savings Plans:
apply broadly across EC2 and Fargate compute, offering savings
comparable to convertible RIs, apply more widely than a
convertible RI, even across regions.
EC2 Instance Savings Plans: apply to compute that matches
compute usage more specifically, applying to a single family in
a single region; more restrictive, but higher discounts and less
restrictive than a standard RI.
Azure RIs: Correct Answers - purchased for an Azure regions,
virtual machine type, and term (one year or three years)
- not as specific as AWS operating system or availability zone
- can be exchanged across any region and any series, but the
change must be requested via a support form (not
programmatically)
- can only be assigned to one subscription (account) so they
don't float like they do in AWS
- all upfront payment is required
- instance size flexibility is fully functional
basic format of billing data Correct Answers - time period
- amount of the resource used
- rate details used for the charge during that period
- where in the world it is located by region
- the resource ID
, - metadata attributes that can be used to allocate the spend to a
product
blended rates Correct Answers standardized rate paid for the
same resource by evenly distributing the charges to each
resource
CapEx vs OpEx Correct Answers capitalized expense vs
operation expense
If an organization writes a check to acquire something, does that
acquisition benefit future periods? If it does, it's capitalized
expense; if not, it's operational expense (expended in this period
with no future benefit)
Chapter 1: What Is FinOps? conclusion Correct Answers -
FinOps is about collaboration between all teams inside an
organization.
- Everyone has a part to play and should become cost-aware.
- The core principles of FinOps should be the foundation of all
processes around cloud financial management.
- Real-time reporting gauges your current spend and
optimizations.
- Data-driven processes are key to an organization becoming
cost-efficient.
- Business decisions can accelerate and match the rate of cloud
resource decisions.
Chapter 10: Adjusting to Hit Goals conclusion Correct Answers
- The optimize phase is not always about reducing costs -- it's
about spending efficiently.
