FinOps in Action

What does good FinOps look like inside a large engineering organization?

In this episode of FinOps in Action, I sit down with Idaliz Baez, Founder and Director of RealOps, who has one of the most fascinating journeys into FinOps — from contamination engineer at NASA to FinOps instructor and leader.

Idaliz has trained more than 200 FinOps practitioners worldwide and brings a unique perspective on how education and awareness can unlock collaboration across engineering, finance, and procurement teams.

We dive into:
  • How a NASA engineer found her way into FinOps

  • Why focusing only on cost reduction is a common mistake

  • How training builds a shared FinOps language across teams

  • Why clean data and strong tagging practices are critical to success

  • What makes financial concepts harder for engineers to grasp

  • When to bring in external trainers vs. build programs in-house

If you're growing your FinOps team, building better collaboration between tech and finance, or just starting your FinOps journey, this episode gives you the mindset and methods to build smarter from day one.

 🎧 Subscribe for more FinOps leadership conversations → https://www.finopsinaction.com/  

 Quote of the Show:
  • "A common mistake [I see people make] would be to just focus on reducing cost and to not really think about, ‘Well, what is our cost getting us?’" - Idaliz Baez

Connect with Idaliz:

Ways to Tune In:

Creators and Guests

Host
Alon Arvatz
Producer
Lexi Musico

What is FinOps in Action?

Welcome to FinOps in Action! Join host, Alon Arvatz, Each week, as he sits down with FinOps experts to explore the toughest challenges between FinOps and Engineering. This show is brought to you by PointFive - empowering teams to optimize cloud costs with deep detection and remediation tools that drive action.

Idaliz Baez: a good, a good common mistake would be to just focus on reducing cost and to not really think about, well, what is our cost getting us,

Alon Arvatz: And what's harder to teach technical folks, financial principles or teach finance FO folks, engineering and technical principles.

Idaliz Baez: I think teaching technical people

financial

Alon Arvatz: Really?

Idaliz Baez: Yeah, I

Alon Arvatz: Wow.

Idaliz Baez: I do.

Alon Arvatz: Hello everyone. Welcome to FinOps in Action. For those of you who follow us for a while already know that I'm particularly intrigued by FinOps people career path, and today's guest has a very, very unique career path. She actually started her career as contamination engineer at nasa. What does that mean?

At some point, she moved to sales engineering at Aptio, and from there, the road to FinOps was paved. She was speaker at finops X, Google Next, and many other industry events, and she won the first most impactful instructor award at finops X 2022. I'm happy to welcome founder and director of RealOps, Idaliz Baez. Idaliz, how you doing today?

Idaliz Baez: Hi. I am good. Thank you. Yourself?

Alon Arvatz: I'm great. So good to see you Idaliz. Please share us the one thing you got wrong when you started your finish career.

Idaliz Baez: Yes. Uh, so for me, I definitely used to focus way too much on the money aspect, and also I would look at just like an absolute value. So I would just look at the total dollar amount that was spent. Um, and sometimes you can benefit from looking at that, but it's not. It's not always the most beneficial way of, um, taking a look at where your inefficiencies are.

So I eventually then moved on to figuring out what are you getting with that money that's being spent and asking for another number instead of just looking at a single number. So total amount of money over how much, um, over how much time, total amount of money spent on what or for what. Um, I'd also started to take a look at trying to take a look more at unit economics instead of just.

know, a single tangible number. You know, what is something worth, what is it providing, um, the team. And I moved from then looking at just that monetary aspect to also then looking at efficiencies. Um, so looking at things other than just the dollar value. Um, so I think that that was the biggest mistake I started

Alon Arvatz: Yeah, I think it's a very common trend now, moving from looking at spend to looking at efficiency. That's how I like to frame it. And I wonder when you say efficiency, you mentioned things like unit, unit economics, and. How much I spend on what per what, for example, are you also referring to efficient use of infrastructure and basically identifying waste, clean up waste, preventing waste as well?

Is that part of it?

Idaliz Baez: Yeah, Yeah, absolutely. And you can also take a look at like, how are you architecting your applications? So are they. Are they architected in a way that they've actually already of been, you know, utilizing things that are more, more modern so you're not utilizing something that's actually inefficient or more, um, more cost impactful because it's out to date, out of date.

Um, 'cause sometimes even just updates and upgrades to your architecture can, can also help, uh, you be more efficient, um, and make you be less wasteful. Uh, so that's another, another thing to, to keep in mind.

Alon Arvatz: Absolutely. And actually I said something very interesting because when people. Usually talk about waste. They talk about analyzing the infrastructure, understand how the infrastructure looks like, how it behave against what I'm using. Um, and you also mentioned looking at the application and architecture of the application.

I usually meaning at, uh, meaning like looking at the code for example and stuff like that to find the inefficiencies.

Idaliz Baez: Yeah, that's one way of doing it. Looking at the code or just like looking as well at like how is it built? So what, um, what services are being deployed to use it. Um, are you utilizing the most efficient services? Are they, you know, up to date? Are they, um, you know, how, how is that all kind of strung together?

'cause that's, that's another way of taking a look at whether or not you are being, um, as efficient as you can be.

Alon Arvatz: Okay. Very cool. And where did you get this insight? Was that part of your role in sales engineer up to you where it all started?

Idaliz Baez: yeah, I think for me that one came from just being an engineer. Um, I like to be really hands-on, so I kind of was thinking about, oh, well there's more to it than just, you know, what are we spending money on? It's also, well, how are we architecting this application? Is that also efficient? Is what we're, you know, what we are deploying?

Is that making sense? Are we deploying in the right regions? Are we utilizing the right size of an instance? Are we, you know, are we using the right, um, you know, the right, the right. right pieces to put the puzzle together in a way that makes sense.

Alon Arvatz: so you say engineer is an engineer. It doesn't matter if it's a contamination engineer at NASA or software engineer at Adobe.

Idaliz Baez: Still an engineer.

Alon Arvatz: Okay. Gotcha, gotcha. And really, let's talk about the elephant in the room. You're not a proper FinOps practitioner, right? You have your own company, it's called RealOps. Can you share with us what you do at RealOps?

Idaliz Baez: Yeah, so I, um, onboard and train, um, teams, uh, to that want to pass their finops, uh, practitioner certification. I also do, um, bespoke trainings as well as, uh, finops services. So sometimes I am employed, um, to help kind of either ramp up or start a finops. Um. A finops skill or a finops team. Other times I'm there to just help kind of, um, help during a period where they've got a period of growth, um, or help with, say they've got tagging policy nightmare that needs to be remediated and, and they need help with that.

Or, um, you know, things along those lines. So I have other, um, other kind of reasons for being employed, um, outside of just training as well.

Alon Arvatz: Nice. But the focus on training is actually very unique. I'm personally not familiar with anyone else who does something like that.

Idaliz Baez: Yeah, I don't really know if there are very many. I think there used to be a few other training providers, but I think that's kind of fallen, fallen to the wayside a bit.

Alon Arvatz: Nice. So you're a unicorn and it at least, how many people have you trained so far?

Idaliz Baez: Uh, over 200.

Alon Arvatz: Wow. Wow. You need to close the deal with the foundation somehow to get some, uh, share of all the certifications.

Idaliz Baez: That would be neat.

Alon Arvatz: Absolutely. So you're focusing on FinOps training. You trained over 200 people. What did you learn from Drift training?

200 people.

Idaliz Baez: Yeah. Yeah. I've learned a lot, to be fair. Um, so I would say that one of the, one of the biggest things I've learned is from. Like other people's experiences, especially people not coming from the engineering background. So especially listening to somebody from finance or from from procurement, hearing their side of the story, hearing what they see, you know, that they see, oh, I just see this big dollar amount and it's attached to AWS or it's attached to our cloud vendor, and I don't know what it means.

And I'm, I'm tasked with, you know, justifying this budget and it doesn't make sense. So hearing those types of stories kind of taught me a lot. more about finops than I could have imagined. And you learn a lot about, you know, people's priorities because they go into the course and they clearly want to learn X, Y, Z, right?

They are like really focused on, I really wanna learn, I about, you know, rate efficiency, or I really wanna learn about my unit economic KPIs or, um, yeah. So I think that you can really learn a lot from. These other people's like kind of stories of where, where they're coming from and why are they joining the finops world.

Alon Arvatz: So why did you learn from working with procurement people, for example, and do you have any specific story about an interesting procurement person that maybe something special?

Idaliz Baez: Yeah, procurement is, is one of my favorites. They, um, so I think that they sit in a very unique spot where they are, you know, in charge of kind of talking to those vendors and really kind of making sure that, that our licenses make sense and that they are, um, aligned with, you know, the demand that, that we have, um, in an organization.

And, um, and so I think that they sit in a really interesting space. Um, and so procurement I think, has taught me, you know, the importance of Understanding how your licenses work and understanding, you know, the timeframe that you have them. So like when are they expiring? What is the cost? You know, who's actually using them?

Are they being utilized? Um, yes, there's a lot that goes into that. Definitely

Alon Arvatz: Yeah. Very cool. And I.

assume when you go to a company, to a person to train him, uh, you get exposed to all the mistakes they're making or all the non best practices they have in place. What are some of the more common mistakes people do in FinOpss?

Idaliz Baez: Hmm. Yeah. Um, so I would say a good, a good common mis mistake would be to just focus on reducing cost and to not really think about, well, what is our cost getting us, because it doesn't always have to be a bad thing that our spend is going up. If what, what we're getting in return is, is well worth it. So sometimes it could just mean that we're actually, like, we're in a period of growth and that's why we're spending more. And it's, you know, there's actually, it's a, it's a good thing. I think it's really common. A big common mistake would just be to just focus on, I need to produce the overall amount of money that we're, is being spent.

And that's it. And that's all they focus on. Instead of kind of taking a look at, well, what other, what other things can we be measuring? What else is important? Um, what else can we, you know, be improving? Um, you know, what else is out there that we can be taking a look at instead? So.

Alon Arvatz: Very interesting. Um, and I assume you work out with people who are getting into finops for the first time in their life? Correct.

Idaliz Baez: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Especially, you know, when you're doing the, the course and, you know, those people tend to be brand new,

Alon Arvatz: Nice. And what tips do you have for people who are now just getting into Phoenix?

Idaliz Baez: uh, talk to as many people as possible. Everybody's very friendly in the community. So my, my biggest tip is just, you know. Share stories, receive stories, just talk to people, ask questions. Um, yeah, be vocal in the community. Um, there's a lot of, a lot of really, um, friendly faces.

Alon Arvatz: I have to concur on that. I, I personally enjoyed it. You know, people are very friendly, very open, and that's how I got a very, very nice start into the FinOps space as well. So plus one for that. And that is, I'm very curious about how you structure the training themselves. Like are you more focused on the technical parts?

You more focused on the financial parts, do you do it mix? Where do you put the focus when you build trainings?

Idaliz Baez: Yeah, so I think it depends on the mix of the audience. So I try to on the subjects that are the least comfortable for the audience. So if it's an audience filled with developers, we'll probably focus more on the finance aspects, um, and then vice versa. So trying to kind of or spend the most time on what is their forte is, I think the most important thing.

Because that's where they can grow the most. That's where they can learn the most. That's like the, you know, the, the part that is, you know, more difficult for them to maybe grasp or understand. So we'll spend the most time on that. Um, and that's what I try and do. As much as it might be the most uncomfortable way to, to run a course, um, it, it is the one that is the most beneficial, I think, to the students.

Alon Arvatz: Absolutely. And what's harder to teach technical folks, financial principles or teach finance FO folks, engineering and technical principles.

Idaliz Baez: I think teaching technical people

financial

Alon Arvatz: Really?

Idaliz Baez: Yeah, I

Alon Arvatz: Wow.

Idaliz Baez: I do. I know it sounds kind of silly, but it's just like there is just something really difficult sometimes about some of the terminology that finance.

Teams and finance people

use and it's, um, is its own, it's its own little world.

I mean, I know that the tech language also, you know, that we've got a lot of acronyms and things like that, but there are a lot of people that are tech savvy without being technically minded, if that makes sense. So I think that can be a little bit easier than. Than learning the ins and outs of finance, especially opex and CapEx and amortization, and you know, all of those kind of words, and you're just like, oh, what does all of this mean?

And why? Why? So, yeah.

Alon Arvatz: Cool. And you, you see some objection to, Hey, why do I need it anyway? I am an engineer and.

Idaliz Baez: Yeah, sometimes. And then I explain like, well, you know what? All of the things that you're doing, they, they spend money and it costs money. And it's, you kind of need to understand what does that mean to the business? And, you know, how is that impactful? And you will, you will appreciate understanding these concepts later.

Um, even if at the moment you might think, why, why am I doing this, um, type of thing. Yeah.

Alon Arvatz: Interesting. And it actually raises another question and I wonder what is the motivation of, of companies to send their people to training? And I, I have a very, very specific thing I would like to understand. So I'm sure there are companies who want certain group of people to start doing finops. As their main job.

So of course they need to know how to do it, but I'm sure there are people who, that's not their main job, and I'm curious if companies wanna train them as well for awareness and maybe building a common language.

Idaliz Baez: Yes, definitely. I think the common language thing is, is spot on. That is a hundred percent why a lot of companies will send more than just. Their core finops persona people into a training because finops team will be working with other teams, like the engineering team, like the finance team, and it's important for those other team members that will be working with finops to understand the overall goal, to understand, like you said, to have a common language to, to be working towards the same thing.

Um, and so I find that that is a, a good motivation for training. I also find that. Another really good motivation for training is when an organization realizes that they're trying to do finops, but they're not actually getting anything done, or it's, you know, nothing's being efficient, like they realize that they're not getting the results, so that maybe they should be, then they turn to training to say, okay, maybe we should just get educated first and then take two and let's see if we can be more efficient after we're we're educated.

Alon Arvatz: That's like so trivial, but, so no, not obvious at the same time, because I think I've spent here like dozens of discussions about how to drive engineering engagement and people were talking about putting the right data in front of them and people talked about, you know, the soft skill, how to talk with them.

We talked about gamification and how to drive accountability and motivation. But like no one said the obvious, like you need to do, give them some training so they will know what they need to do. And even, even if they already know, it can also raise their awareness.

Idaliz Baez: Exactly. Yeah. Having some type of baseline is just so helpful. So then you can just be like, oh, okay, now I understand. These are the basics. This is, this is kind of my, like my, my baseline, my my step one, my step two, and then they can go from there and they can be more advanced later.

Alon Arvatz: Very cool. And just for our audience. Is not sponsoring this episode. I'm not promoting hair because anything, it's just really, really interesting, interesting practice. I think all of us should, uh, consider

and idel, I'm now thinking about the fitness practitioner out there. Think, starting to think about training and how they can embed training in their.

Finops strategy or finops program. And how do you look at like getting someone from outside to do the training versus building a in-house? When do you recommend to do either

Idaliz Baez: Um. Yeah, so I think that if there is something very I.

Like a really particular problem that a company is facing, or something that's really, really special to the, the organization. They wanna maybe have their own like bespoke training 'cause they wanna be able to talk about their environment.

They wanna be able to like, put real world stories behind it and they, they wanna like really kind of dive deep at a, in, into a different level. That would make sense. otherwise like having. A more you know, general training with, with a variety of organizations, um, will be just fine. But I do, recognize that there are some companies that like really wanna talk about their issues and they wanna talk about their data and they wanna talk about like, well in this scenario or just the other week, or, and in that case they might wanna have their own kind of like private training.

Alon Arvatz: Gotcha. And, um, what's your perspective about Grades.

Idaliz Baez: Grades. Yeah. Um, oh yeah. So luckily the, the exam for the practitioner course is, I think it's like a 75%. Pass rate. So it's just like, it's not, it's not too bad. Um, and I don't, I don't, I don't go through a, a training course and like give people a grade. Um, although I should consider it. That would be fun, fun for me, probably absolutely terrifying for everybody sitting in on the course.

Um, yeah. So I would say, I would say it's not really something to, to stress about or to worry about.

Alon Arvatz: Okay, cool. So, so guys, think about great, if you wanna have fun, do grades, give grades to everyone in the company? Um, if not, you can go without grades. That's cool. And ade, I know you're very, very big on data in finops and getting the data right and trusting your data. I would love to get some insights from you on how to do it on the best way possible.

Idaliz Baez: Yeah, absolutely. So I would definitely first want to ensure that you are looking at data that's clean. making sure that you're not like looking at duplicate data, making sure that you've got like the data from the correct timeframe. Um, so both of those are, are really important. And then taking a look at, well, what am I trying to answer?

So that way you're looking at the right data sources. So are you getting data just strictly from your cloud provider? Do you also need to have data from, um, from any other sources? Are there some other like intangible sources that you need to be collecting data from or taking a look at? Um, so really kind of take a look at the whole.

The whole array of data sources that you might need in order to answer the questions that you are, that you're asking on a day-to-day basis. From a

finops

perspective, like where are we spending the most money? How, why is this application costing more than this one? Um, you know, what, you know, where can we be more efficient with, um, our deployments?

Um, think like things along those lines. And then taking a look at, okay, well where are we hosting our applications and, and where are we seeing any errors and, and things like that. So, yeah.

Alon Arvatz: And I also feel that sometimes people, uh, bind themselves to the out of the box reports they get from the tools they have, and in a way like force the organization. Measuring and tracking what some product manager at some random company decide that you need to look at. Is that something that you see with the people you work with?

Idaliz Baez: Yeah, I think it is. It's really easy I think to fall back on just using the outta the box reports. Um, but I definitely always recommend kind of trying to, if possible, like start from scratch and have your own, have your own. I. Vision board of, of all of the important KPIs that you need to be tracking and monitoring, like your costs over time and your cost trends over time, and the variances that you're looking at, what thresholds are you trying to maintain, things like that.

And which KPIs are the most important that you really wanna have highlighted at the top of the screen so you can be checking them on a daily basis, you know? Um, and that's not always given in the outta the box reports, so it's not always something that is gonna be, readily available. It might be something that you have to.

yourself. Um, and that's, that's okay.

Alon Arvatz: Interesting. One of the things that I personally see with, uh, practitioners out there is that they're leaning more towers reports with the BI tools of the cloud providers, like, like Power bi, because they want the flexibility because they wanna answer, they question that they care about because they want to see it in a way they like to see it.

Is that a trend you're also seeing? Do you feel the world is going that direction?

Idaliz Baez: Yeah, I've noticed that as well. I think it's also a comfort factor. I think sometimes it's just, it's really comfortable to use what is already given to you. Um, so I think that that makes sense. don't, I don't think there's anything wrong with that, as long as you are making sure that it's answering all of the questions that you need answered.

Um, and as long as it's doing that, then that's fine.

Alon Arvatz: And do you feel like it's the finops, uh, job to get into data hygiene and make sure that all the data is right?

Idaliz Baez: Absolutely. Yeah. Uh, it's a hundred percent the job of the finops person to make sure that your data is clean and it's not being duplicated, or it's not, you know, short, uh, you're not missing something. It's not, you know, um, it's coming in in a timely fashion as well. Um, that's definitely all, all the responsibility of your finops, uh, your finops team.

Alon Arvatz: Yeah.

and I always feel like data is something that doesn't come natural. At least the cloud data doesn't come naturally to. Our finance people and our like classic software developers. This is for example, why you have today data engineers because it's, it's something a bit, uh, a bit different. So when you do your training, do you also put more focus on, on the data?

Idaliz Baez: We do have a little section about data and we definitely do spend a little bit of time talking about it and talking about like, how do you tag your data appropriately? You know, how are you going, how are you going to kinda make sure that you've got all the data that you need to have the, you know, the right, the right level of reporting.

Um, so we definitely do have a small focus on it. I wouldn't say it's, it's a large focus of the course, but I definitely do think that it is time is spent on it.

Alon Arvatz: And do you see people, uh, leaning more towards, uh, focus? Like the focus framework, not the word focus.

Idaliz Baez: yeah. I do think people are like excited about focus and trying to implement it and really taking a look at it, which I think is great. Um, I think it's, um, I think it's, it's was well needed and um, it's definitely nice to see that people are excited to try and bring that into their daily basis.

Alon Arvatz: Very cool. I have to tell you, I'm personally also excited about focus. So it definitely makes sense to me and I'm sure to many people that listen to us right now. Very nice. This was really, really cool to get into all the training aspects and I think the training is something you can bring from outside.

You can also build in-house and take a lot of the principles that you share with us. And I.

definitely wanna learn more about you on the personal level is,

uh, so first of all, how did you get to becoming a contamination engineer at nasa?

Idaliz Baez: Yes. Um, so I actually, I worked at nasa, um, as an intern in my secondary school, um, during the summers, and then I was a co-op. So I, when I was at university, I would there during the winter and during the summer. And then when I graduated university, I went full-time and was a contamination engineer.

And I, um. I don't really know how I found that particular branch. I just, I, I think I just was, was placed there. Um, and I'm really thankful that I did. I have some really good friends that, uh, that still work there. And the biggest project that I worked on was the James Web Space Telescope. And, um, those mirrors, they were like my babies.

They came into the, they came into the clean room and I was watching over them and monitoring them, and it was a, yeah, it was, it was a joy to be a part of that project.

Alon Arvatz: Very cool. And how did you decide to live nasa?

Idaliz Baez: So I went to go get a master's in engineering management and I originally thought I was gonna go back, but then I took an internship job at a data connectivity company in the pre-sales department, and I just kind of fell in love. I fell in love with data and technology and presales, and I didn't go back.

Alon Arvatz: Very cool. Very cool. And where do you live today?

Idaliz Baez: Uh, yeah. So I live near London.

Alon Arvatz: Oh, nice. And you're originally from the London.

area.

Idaliz Baez: No, I am, um, I'm Puerto Rican, so I'm originally from, uh, the Midwest in the United

States.

Alon Arvatz: Ah, wow. Wow. So how did you get to England?

Idaliz Baez: Yeah, I moved here for work, although a lot of people will say that. That's silly. I moved here for my husband. Um, a little bit of both. Two things can be true. Um, so yeah. Um, I moved here about, about seven years ago.

Um, yeah.

Alon Arvatz: Okay. Hassman plus work, definitely reasonable, uh, reasons to move to a different country. Um, cool. And can you share with us what you like to do outside of work?

Idaliz Baez: yeah.

Uh, I love board games.

Alon Arvatz: Oh,

Idaliz Baez: board games. Yeah. Um, I also, this is very, very nerdy. I'm also in a DD campaign,

Alon Arvatz: oh, wow.

Idaliz Baez: I am properly a nerd. Um, or, or I'll play, uh, video games, um, or I love hanging out with my two children, that involves child cartoons and coloring and going on walks and swimming.

Alon Arvatz: Cool. And you also have a NASA rocket behind you, so

Idaliz Baez: Yeah. Yeah. Saturn five. Lego.

Alon Arvatz: It's a Lego. one. Wow.

Idaliz Baez: It was very fun to put together.

Alon Arvatz: That's massive. Okay. Wow. I've never built something that big, honestly. Very cool. Very cool. Um, great. So Idel is, that was really awesome. I'm sure people would love to reach out and ask questions and ask about training. What's the best way to reach out to you?

Idaliz Baez: Just, uh, reach out on, uh, on my LinkedIn. I think that's the best way to

do it.

Alon Arvatz: Very cool. Uh, I assume people can also visit RealOps.io, the website to read and see more. Uh, so you're welcome to do that. Um, Idaliz, I felt like I learned a lot about training and actually it.

opened my mind with the importance of training is another tool in your finops toolbox of, of getting people more aware, more engaged, more knowledgeable, and especially drive outcomes, freedom of outcomes.

Idaliz Baez: Absolutely.

Alon Arvatz: Great. So thank you so much for joining us today, Idaliz,

Idaliz Baez: Thank you for having me.

Alon Arvatz: and I would love once again to Thank our audience for joining us, listening in, and following us one episode after another. It's a lot of fun to me. I'm sure to you.

too. Please tell your friends about the podcast and follow our newsletter. I thank you again.

This has been another fun, interesting, exciting episode of FinOps in Action. See you next time.