FinOps

FinOps is cloud cost management with engineering involved. It is less about one monthly report and more about giving teams enough feedback to make sensible decisions before the bill lands.

Good FinOps work usually starts small: tag resources, find idle workloads, right-size oversized services, and show cost changes in pull requests. Automation helps too. If a dev environment only needs to run during office hours, turn it off outside those hours.

The awkward bit is ownership. A cloud bill is shared by finance, platform teams, and product teams, but only some of those people can change the infrastructure. FinOps works best when the people who create spend can see it quickly.