FinOps
FinOps, short for cloud financial operations, is the practice of managing cloud spend as a shared responsibility of engineering, finance and product. Teams get timely cost data for what they run, decide on trade-offs between speed, cost and quality, and track spend against business value. The FinOps Foundation describes it as a loop of three phases: inform, optimize and operate.
How it works
Inform: tag resources by team and service so the bill can be split and shown back to owners.
Optimize: rightsize, schedule, use spot instances and buy commitments for steady load.
Operate: set budgets and alerts, and review cost per unit, such as cost per order.
A rightsizing example: an m5.2xlarge on demand in us-east-1 costs $0.384 an hour, about $280 a month. If it idles at 15% CPU, an m5.large at $0.096 an hour costs about $70. That saves about $210 a month per instance.
Why it matters in production
Cloud cost is an engineering decision made in every pull request, not a bill finance sees a month later. Without ownership and tags, nobody knows which service doubled the bill. Cost cuts must also respect reliability, so headroom stays a deliberate choice.
See also
On the One2N blog
Further reading
