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5 FinOps Slides Every Board Will Love
Struggling to demonstrate cloud ROI? We've got you covered.
Our new board slides template is designed to help you:
Highlight your team's impact with actionable insights
Simplify complex data for easy board discussions
Showcase essential cloud cost metrics
Make your next board meeting smooth, impactful, and stress-free.
FINOPS PRACTICES
FinOps, Brick by Brick
This article breaks down how different sized companies can make sense of their cloud spending using simple building blocks.
Think of cloud costs like Lego pieces. Each cost is a brick that seems small on its own. But when you put them together the right way, you can build something that makes business sense.
The author follows four types of companies to show how cloud cost problems change as you grow bigger.
The key insight is that every cloud cost comes down to a simple math problem.
Cost = Rate * Quantity
Most companies focus only on getting better rates through discounts. But the real savings often come from using less stuff.
Cloud usage follows patterns like a city skyline made of Lego blocks. Some hours are busy with tall towers of activity. Other times are quiet with short buildings. Most companies build for the busiest time and waste money during quiet periods.
Companies also need to pick the right mix of cloud services. Some are like permanent Lego blocks that cost less but lock you in. Others are like loose pieces that cost more but give you flexibility. The cheapest option can disappear without warning, like rare Lego sets.
One of the hardest problems is splitting costs fairly. Some cloud services are shared between teams, like a Lego base plate that supports multiple buildings. Others belong to just one team.
The article shows how a simple API service grew from an experiment to serving many customers. When finance asked what each customer cost, nobody could answer.
FinOps EVENTS
Event: The Hybrid FinOps Advantage
FinOps has expanded far beyond public cloud. Managing costs across data centers, AWS, Azure, SaaS, and AI workloads separately prevents total cost visibility and missed savings.
Discover how FinOps 2.0 strategies deliver comprehensive optimization across your entire technology portfolio.
You'll Learn How To:
Achieve total cost visibility across data centers, multi-cloud, SaaS, and AI infrastructure
Optimize the complete technology stack with unified intelligence and automation
Break down silos between FinOps, ITAM, procurement, and engineering teams
Speakers
Jeremy Chaplin, Gerhard Behr & Victor Garcia
November 13th - 6:00 PM CEST / 10AM EST
AWS
AWS Lambda Cold Start Billing Guide
For years, AWS Lambda cold starts were mostly free for standard ZIP-based functions. That free ride is officially over. Now every single millisecond of the INIT phase gets billed just like your regular function runtime.
This means when your Lambda function spins up for the first time or after being idle, you pay for all that setup time. Before this change, AWS only charged for the actual work your function did. Now they charge for the prep time too. The biggest pain points will be:
VPC-attached functions that take longer to set up network connections
Functions that don't run often and face frequent cold starts
Large deployment packages that take more time to load
5 ways to fight back against these new costs:
Track your InitDuration metrics in CloudWatch to see which functions cost the most during startup
Use SnapStart for Java, Python, and .NET functions to skip most of the cold start time
Remove functions from VPCs when they don't actually need private network access
Increase memory allocation to get more CPU power and faster startup times
Consider Provisioned Concurrency for critical functions to avoid cold starts entirely
The math has changed completely. What used to be just a performance problem is now a direct cost problem. Every optimization you make to reduce cold start time now saves real money on your AWS bill.
CLOUD PROVIDERS
AWS Now Multi-Org Consolidated Billing Views
AWS
Consolidate Your Spend with Multi-Org Billing Views
A New Way to Run Containers with ECS Managed Instances
Get 4x Size from EBS gp3 Volumes
99 EC2 Instances in New Compute Optimizer
Microsoft Azure
A Fully Managed Kubernetes Experience with AKS Automatic
Microsoft Unifies Its Commercial Marketplaces
Google Cloud
Track Your GKE Costs with More Granularity
M&A
Why Kela Technologies Acquired FinOps Startup Pelanor
Kela Technologies, a company built to create an "operating system for militaries," spent up to $30 million buying Pelanor, a firm that helps companies manage their cloud computing costs.
This seems odd at first. Why would a military tech company buy a tool designed to analyze Amazon Web Services bills? The answer shows how smart business ideas can jump between very different worlds.
Kela believes the same methods used to track cloud spending can help manage military resources. When Pelanor's AI spots a sudden spike in database costs, it can trace the problem to bad code. On a battlefield, that same AI could notice a drone squadron using 30% more battery than expected, possibly due to enemy interference.
Both companies share deep roots in Israel's elite tech and intelligence units. Their founders come from programs like Unit 8200 and Talpiot, creating trust that goes beyond a typical business deal.
The deal got backing from an important investor: In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm. This support shows that rapid integration of commercial tech into military systems isn't just a business idea - it's a national security priority.
📺️ VIDEO
Understanding AI's Role in FinOps
Learn how AI tools can enhance cost allocation, automate repetitive tasks, and create actionable insights, leading to more efficient and effective financial management.
We explore how AI is revolutionizing FinOps with guest Ben Schechter, CEO & Co-Founder of Vantage. Ben explains the intricacies of cloud cost management, the importance of Model Context Protocol (MCP), and how leveraging AI can optimize FinOps practices.
Explore Vantage at https://vantage.sh/
KUBERNETES
EKS & Kubecost for Cost Optimization [CODE EXAMPLE]
A developer shows how to build a complete cost tracking system for cloud infrastructure that works from day zero through daily operations. Here's what the system does:
Before you deploy anything, Infracost reads your Terraform files and tells you how much your infrastructure will cost each month. You can set up rules to block expensive changes in pull requests automatically.
Once your EKS cluster is running, Kubecost tracks who spends what money and where. It shows costs by team, application, or any label you choose. The tool also predicts costs for the next 180 days based on current usage patterns.
The author built scenarios you can run to see how costs change when you scale up apps, increase resource requests, or add storage. Each test can be rolled back with one command.
The system compares your original cost estimates with actual spending every day. When real costs drift too far from estimates, you get alerts to investigate.
The complete setup runs on AWS EKS with an RDS database. All code and configs are available in a public GitHub repo that you can clone and run yourself. The author warns to destroy resources after testing to avoid ongoing charges.
🎖️ MENTION OF HONOUR
Using drones for FinOps with AWS Agentic AI
Engineers often get excited about building cool AI features but forget about the money side of things. This is exactly what happened with AI workloads after the big generative AI boom.
Many teams built proof-of-concept projects that never made it to production, leaving companies wondering where their return on investment went.
The solution starts simple: make your AI costs visible and define what counts as an AI workload for your specific use case. The FinOps organization suggests starting small and building from there.
Using the FOCUS v1.2 standard helped because AI workloads often spread across multiple clouds and environments. The author used AWS's Kiro tool to build a dashboard showing overall spend, return on investment, and cost savings.
For this specific app, costs included:
AI models and agents through Amazon Bedrock
Storage with Amazon S3
Compute with AWS Lambda
Database with DynamoDB
Other services like API Gateway and CloudFront
Data transfer costs over 100GB
Real-world scenarios get more complex. You might need to factor in other cloud providers, SaaS tools, vector databases for AI search, fine-tuning costs, multi-region setups, and unexpected usage spikes that blow up token counts.
Professional Spotlight
Sam Hogarth
Banking FinOps Mastering
Sam was one of the first speakers that submitted a talk in the summit. It is a pleasure to know someone from a company like Tesco is into it.
That’s all for this week. See you next Sunday!
2 Days of a Full FinOps Experience
The FinOps Event You Can’t Miss (And it’s FREE)
Move from quick fixes to strategic planning
Strengthen your financial metrics
Use AI to optimize costs
This is the last big FinOps event of 2025, showcasing proven strategies from companies handling large cloud budgets.
October 23 24, 2025
3:00 PM - 9:00 PM CEST / 9:00 AM - 3:00 PM EST
Limited seats available
FinOps for Everyone!