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This International Women's Day, CloudZero and Campfire are bringing together women finance leaders to tackle the challenges reshaping modern finance: volatile cloud costs, unpredictable AI spend, and usage-based pricing models that demand a smarter operating model.

Join us March 19 to learn how future-ready finance teams are building real-time visibility, tying infrastructure spend to margins, and forecasting with confidence.

What an ARTICLE by JILL KAY. Must Read.

Two companies start with the same cloud bill. One has a talented team that reviews costs and makes recommendations. The other has built a system that finds waste and fixes it automatically or through clear processes. A year later, the first company is still writing tickets and hoping someone will act on them. The second company has cut costs significantly and keeps them low without constant effort.

The difference is simple: one company has good intentions, the other has a working system.

Your cloud creates hundreds of ways to save money every month. Each one needs someone to review it, decide what to do, assign it to the right team, and verify it got done. The engineers who can fix these issues are busy with their regular work.

The FinOps team that finds the issues does not control the infrastructure. Recommendations pile up faster than anyone can handle them. New waste gets created as fast as old waste gets fixed. Even the best FinOps team working manually is playing catch-up forever. Stop for a month and you are back where you started.

The 3 Levels of Action.

Fully automated: Low risk actions that need no human approval. Delete unused storage volumes in test environments. Stop idle servers that are not in production.

Process-driven: Actions that need human judgment but have clear owners and deadlines. Resize a production database to match actual usage. Change reserved instance coverage based on new patterns. Modify architecture to reduce data transfer costs.

Ad hoc: Human judgment with no process at all. No owner, no timeline, no follow-up. This is where most companies operate today. This is also where recommendations go to die. The goal is to automate what you can safely automate. Build reliable processes for what you cannot automate. Get rid of the ad hoc category completely.

What a system actually looks like:

The result is cost optimization that runs like deployments in a mature engineering organization: continuously and reliably, without needing a meeting.

Here is a simple test: When your FinOps tool finds a way to save money today, what happens next? Who gets notified? When does it need to be done by? Who checks that it actually happened?

If your answer is "it depends" or "someone looks at it eventually," you do not have a system. You have a hope.

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VPC Encryption Controls is moving to a paid model with hourly per-VPC charges.

Marketplace Concurrent Agreements now allow multiple SaaS purchases for the same product within one account.

ECS Managed Instances now integrate with EC2 Capacity Reservations.

Read All AWS Updates

Instant Access Snapshots for Premium SSD v2 and Ultra Disk enable immediate restores with usage-based billing.

Read All Azure Updates

Managed Replacement Constraints (GA) enable org-wide VM policy enforcement.

Compact Placement Policies for Flex-start VMs colocate AI/ML workloads to minimize network hops.

Read All GCP Updates

​Join us at the heart of Hawthorne as we kick off our first-ever LA FinOps Weekly Meetup at the lively Common Space Brewery!

Hosted by FinOps Weekly Regional Leader Diana Molski, this event is your chance to dive into the world of FinOps while enjoying good company and great brews.

​We promise an evening of engaging conversations and a relaxed vibe.

First beer on us, limited slots!

See you there!

📅​ Date: April 9, 2026
🕗​ Time: 5:00pm PT
📍 Common Space Brewery | Hawthorne, California​

A live product review of Costix, FinOpsly’s predictive cost estimation engine that helps teams forecast cloud, data, and AI spend before deployment. See how you can move from reactive reporting to proactive value control over future product investments.

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Frank Contrepois makes a sharp point about why FinOps teams keep going back to spreadsheets. Think about how financial accounting works. Every company uses the same three reports: balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement.

These reports are not perfect. They leave things out. People complain about them all the time. But they are stable. Everyone knows what they mean. So software companies can build good tools on top of them. Accountants can compare numbers across companies. Training materials work everywhere.

FinOps does not have this yet.

Frank suggests FinOps needs three standard views that every organization must use:

Cloud position view showing what is running right now, what you have committed to, and where you have risk. Cloud performance view showing actual spend versus forecast, and explaining why the numbers are different. Cloud cash exposure view showing when money actually leaves your account and where you are locked into future payments.

Once these base reports are standard, tools can get better. Teams can compare their numbers to other companies. Training becomes easier because everyone speaks the same language.

He uses a good example from Big Ben, the famous clock in London. Engineers put old pennies on the pendulum to keep the clock accurate. The pennies are not a sign that the clock is broken. They show the clock is good enough to be worth fine-tuning.

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The first production agent your team ships will probably work great in demos and wreck your cloud bill in production.

Agents add a new cost layer called cognition. Every planning step, every tool call and every retry burns tokens. Two customers with the same number of seats can generate a 10X difference in costs because one has clean workflows and the other lives in exceptions.

Cost per Accepted Outcome, or CAPO (what a Name :D), is the fully loaded cost to deliver one outcome that actually works. The word "accepted" matters. A fast run that produces the wrong answer still burns tokens and tool calls. Acceptance means passing a quality gate: automated validation, a user clicking Apply or a success signal like "ticket not reopened in seven days."

Calculate CAPO per workflow and per customer segment. Watch the distribution, not just the average. Median tells you where the product feels efficient. The 95th and 99th percentile tell you where loops and tool storms are hiding.

Failed runs belong in CAPO automatically. The numerator is total spend for that workflow, including failures. The denominator is accepted outcomes only. Every failure gets paid for by the successes.

Most savings come from architecture and interaction design, not from negotiating pennies per million tokens.

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Amazing guest post by Jordi Espasa. Cloud unit economics isn't a nice-to-have for startups anymore. It's the difference between scaling successfully and burning through cash faster with every new customer.

Cloud unit economics shows you the cost per customer, per transaction, or per active user. This number reveals whether you make or lose money as you grow.

Think of it like this. A food delivery startup celebrates doubling their orders from 10,000 to 20,000 per month. Their cloud costs jump from $100,000 to $250,000. They're losing more money on every single order, but the total spend number hides this reality until the bank account runs dry.

Investors changed what they look for. Your unit economics determine if scaling helps or hurts. The best companies optimize value, not just costs.

Here's how to start without building a massive team: Pick your golden unit. Put cloud costs and business metrics in the same dashboard. Calculate your cloud efficiency ratio.

A startup that ignores unit economics knows how much cash remains but has no idea if they're climbing toward profit or diving toward failure.

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Cloud Solutions Architect @ CoreStack

I am a FinOps certified Practitioner working as a Cloud Solutions Architect at CoreStack, where I help enterprises leverage FinOps principles to achieve cost efficiency, agility, and innovation.

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