FinOps
The practice of giving engineering teams visibility into and accountability for the cost of what they build and run.
The operating premise is that in cloud, the people making architectural decisions are the people making spending decisions, usually without knowing it. FinOps closes that loop: allocate cost to teams and services through tagging, show it to them promptly, and make efficiency a tracked engineering property.
Three phases: inform (visibility and allocation), optimise (rightsizing, committed-use discounts, storage tiering, removing the idle), operate (cost as a design constraint and a review criterion).
The common misreading is that FinOps is cost-cutting. It is unit-cost management — spending more to serve more is fine; the objective is knowing what each unit costs and choosing deliberately.