FinOps Practice
Inform, optimise, operate — and cost as a design-review criterion.
4 to work through
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intermediate
What distinguishes a FinOps practice that works from one that produces reports nobody acts on?
2 min answer -
advanced
An interviewer says - your platform team has found a change that would cut roughly £400000 a year of cloud spend and would take two engineers a quarter to deliver. Talk me through how you decide, and what you would want to know before you answer.
3 min answer -
advanced
Cloud spend has grown 60% in a year while revenue grew 15%. The CFO wants a 30% reduction. How do you respond?
3 min answer -
advanced
How would you make cost a routine engineering concern without slowing delivery?
2 min answer
2 terms in this topic
Neighbouring topics
Cost & FinOps
General material on the economics of an architecture.
Total Cost of Ownership
Lifetime cost including people, operations, upgrades and exit.
Cloud Pricing Models
On-demand, committed and spot, and the crossover arithmetic.
Reserved & Committed Capacity
Committing the baseline, laddering terms, and expiry as a silent failure.
Spot & Interruptible Capacity
Deep discounts for work that can be interrupted and resumed.
Unit Economics
Cost per request, per tenant, per transaction — the actionable number.
Cost per Request
Fully-loaded per-unit cost, including the lines usually left out.
Storage Costs
Tiering, lifecycle policies, retrieval charges and minimum durations.
Network & Egress Costs
Cross-zone and cross-region transfer that appears on no diagram.
Compute Optimisation
Instance families, utilisation, and architecture that wastes less.
Rightsizing
Matching provisioned resources to observed demand rather than to a guess.
Cost Allocation
Tagging enforced at provisioning, and apportioning shared costs.
Showback & Chargeback
Making teams see, or own, the cost of what they run.
Architecture Cost Modelling
Pricing a design before building it, at expected and at ten times volume.
Cost vs Reliability
Each nine costing an order of magnitude, and pricing the failure instead.
Observability Cost
Telemetry bills, cardinality control and retention tiering.
Licence & Vendor Costs
Per-core, per-seat and per-environment terms that shape designs.
Waste Elimination
Idle environments, orphaned volumes, forgotten instances, dead data.
Cost Governance
Budgets, anomaly alerts, quotas and preventive policy.