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FinOps is evolving, and reactive cost management is no longer enough.

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This week, Frank Contrepois wrote an interesting article about how leadership should approach FinOps. Most FinOps work starts with the small stuff. Tags, dashboards, rightsizing reports. These things matter, but they miss the bigger picture.

Cloud spending has grown so large that it now affects the numbers that keep executives up at night. Profit margins, cash runway, and the cost of building new products. When cloud costs reach this level, FinOps needs to change how it works.

Most companies run cloud from the bottom up. Not because they planned it that way, but because that is how cloud entered the building. Teams started using cloud services before anyone asked permission. They paid with credit cards because it was faster than waiting for approvals.

Cloud vendors loved this pattern. They still sell mostly to engineers because engineers do not ask hard questions about price. The result is a mess. Each team makes good local choices, but those choices do not add up to a smart overall plan. Cloud spending becomes an accident instead of a strategy.

Top-down is not about control or micromanagement. It answers one question before any work starts: what are we trying to achieve and why does it matter? Good constraints do not limit innovation. They create it. Give people unlimited options and they wander. Give them a clear problem with real limits and they invent solutions.

Cloud is now one of the biggest operating costs for many companies. It grows faster than revenue and behaves unpredictably. Leaders carry responsibilities that engineering cannot carry. Protecting cash runway, managing risk, balancing growth against profit margins.

FinOps often wants direct access to executives. The thinking goes: if we do important work, we deserve to be in the room where decisions happen. But FinOps is not an executive function. It does not set strategy or decide risk appetite.

What FinOps needs is a proxy. Someone who already sits close to strategic decisions and can carry the economic facts upward. Usually this is the CTO or CIO. Sometimes the chief architect or CFO. FinOps influences through evidence. It shows what technical choices will cost, what they will save, and what they will limit.

Executives do not see tagging completeness or cluster utilization rates. They see profit margins, operating expenses, and cash runway. A missing tag is not an operational annoyance. It is a blind spot that reduces financial predictability. FinOps must translate its work into business outcomes. When savings reduce operating expenses, they often improve operating profit directly.

This is why the comparison to procurement matters. Procurement negotiates better prices and the savings flow straight to profit. Cloud savings work the same way. They reduce the cost base. Lower costs increase financial resilience. More resilience gives the company freedom to invest or survive a tough quarter.

FinOps does not need to solve the accounting puzzle. It needs to work with Finance to understand which improvements have reporting consequences and which do not.

When a CEO talks about disciplined investment, the organization is being told to take efficiency seriously. When they mention platform strengthening, they want consolidation and less drift. FinOps becomes more effective when it reads these signals and frames its work around them.

Many FinOps teams present optimization as a technical exercise. They talk about workloads and unit costs without connecting to the priorities leaders have already announced.

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Your voice defines this community. 2025 is wrapping up. It is time to look back.

We are hosting a special End of Year Community Call.

This is an open conversation. We want to decide our future together.

18th of December - 6PM Spain Time / 12PM EST Time

Open to everyone. Register for the call below.

Database Savings Plans launched with up to 35% discounts on database costs. Commit to $/hour for one year with no upfront payment. Discounts automatically apply across RDS, Aurora, serverless and provisioned instances, regions, and engine types—letting you modernize or migrate without losing savings.

Amazon S3 Vectors is now GA, offering up to 90% cost reduction for vector storage and queries. Supports billions of vectors per index with vector-level encryption and tagging for cost tracking across 14 regions.

S3 Tables Intelligent-Tiering automatically moves table data across access tiers (Frequent, Infrequent, Archive) using 30/90-day policies, reducing storage costs up to ~80% without manual lifecycle rules.

RDS Optimize CPU for M7i/R7i instances disables SMT to lower SQL Server and Windows licensing charges by up to 50% while delivering 55% better price-performance versus prior generations.

And many more inside!

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Read All GCP Updates

Discover what truly defines a mature FinOps expert practice and the hidden skills, mistakes, and mindset shifts that separate beginners from real expert.

Why AWS CostSlayer (Rick Triana) says that rightsizing is nonsense in FinOps.

A new open-source tool called CUDly just launched to help companies buy cloud commitments across AWS, Azure, and GCP with a single command. Azure and GCP support is marked experimental.

The tool works with multiple AWS services right now. It handles Reserved Instances for RDS databases, ElastiCache, EC2 servers, OpenSearch, Redshift, and MemoryDB. It also manages Savings Plans for compute resources.

It lets you buy only a percentage of recommendations. Start with 25% or 50% instead of going all-in at 100%.

The tool creates CSV files you can review offline. Your team can check the numbers before anyone clicks purchase. It filters out database instances running old versions that cost extra in AWS Extended Support fees. Those extra charges can eat into your savings. It checks for duplicate purchases in the last 24 hours. This stops you from accidentally buying the same thing twice.

You control coverage percentage, payment terms, and instance limits. Want to test with just 10 instances in one region? You can do that. Ready to scale up to multiple services? That works too. You can test everything first with dry-run mode before spending any money.

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Cloud capacity planning isn't about counting servers or storage space. It's about understanding how your systems behave under pressure.

François-Yanick Bourassa breaks down what FinOps teams actually forecast when they plan for cloud capacity. Most people think capacity means compute cores, storage growth, or throughput limits. But that's just the output. Real capacity is the machinery underneath - how your architecture reacts, how customers use your services, and where your systems start to break.

The Three Layers That Confuse Everyone

The physical layer is what cloud providers actually have - but you never see it. The logical layer is what your architecture can use - where throttles and limits live. The behavioral layer is what your workloads actually do - the only layer you can forecast.

You track how teams actually use conference rooms, when people work from home, which departments grow seasonally, and where the coffee machine creates bottlenecks every morning.

Cloud capacity works the same way: it's about behavior patterns, not just resource counts.

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This practitioner explains how to use AWS Compute Optimizer new feature that automates EBS volume cleanup and upgrades.

You can schedule automated cleanups to run daily, weekly, or monthly. Pick a quiet time like midnight when no one is working.The system runs on its own and cleans up your storage mess while you sleep.

You can create rules for your whole organization or just specific accounts. Target certain regions where you know old volumes are piling up.Use tags to filter which volumes get touched (finally, those "dev" and "prod" labels become useful).

The system takes snapshots before deleting anything. You can upgrade old gp2 volumes to newer gp3 or io2 types automatically.Before you commit, you can preview your estimated monthly savings.

A dashboard shows you every action the automation takes. You can see your savings add up in real time. Turn rules on or off whenever you want to test or adjust.

Start with your development environment, not production. Creating snapshots can take several hours, so be patient. Wait at least six hours after a volume is modified before the automation touches it again.The system can handle up to 100 actions at once.

At the end of the month, we will publish the ranking of the people who know the most about FinOps.

Participate by answering our questions. There will be surprise gifts to winners every month!

FinOps Rising Start

Ken has been dropping massive hands on articles. It’s amazing how detailed his content is. Definitely someone to follow to learn FinOps.

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