Shifting from FinOps to Financial Engineering
Dvir Mizrahi is Head of Financial Engineering at Wix, the leader in website creation with 220 million users running e-commerce operations. And with over six thousand employees, Wix ships more than fifty thousand builds each day.
Dvir is also among the original authors of the AWS Cloud Financial Management certification.
In this episode, Dvir covers how Wix shifted from FinOps to Financial Engineering. It's an engineering-first approach to build tooling and processes tracking financial key performance indicators (KPIs) for its multi-cloud infrastructure. The new approach established a culture of financial responsibility that supports Wix's continued growth.
Wix started in 2006 and initially ran its infrastructure on-premise. Today, Wix runs a multi-cloud environment on Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS). As Wix shifted from on-premise to the cloud, the procurement process of resources changed with it.
In the old world, purchasing additional hardware was a closed and controlled process. But in the cloud, Dvir compares resource procurement to "a supermarket where people can go in, take whatever they want, and leave without passing the registers." A developer could spin up a hundred thousand instances with just the click of a button.
Wix realized the financial risk that comes with liberal permissions to spin up infrastructure and hired Dvir in 2017. FinOps approaches infrastructure governance from a billing perspective and handles workloads already provisioned in the cloud. But at Wix's scale, where there are thousands of engineers, the FinOps approach stops working. "By the time you have a financial incident, it's too late and you didn't govern anything."
Dvir shifted the strategy to proactively preventing waste in the first place, by incorporating financial KPIs into engineering goals. In addition, Dvir built an internal platform called "InfraGod" which collects infrastructure data, integrates with Terraform, and enforces rules at the time of resource provisioning. Taking action at the time resources are provisioned rather than after the fact is "the difference between Finance and Financial Engineering."
Listen to this episode for a deep dive into the tactics that Dvir uses to run Financial Engineering at Wix, such as data collection, engineering post-mortems, monthly reports, and mandatory resource tagging.
