All terms

Glossary

FinOps

The practice of treating cloud cost as an ongoing engineering decision rather than a monthly invoice that lands in accounting.

FinOps assumes that the people deciding architecture can also see what it costs. That sounds obvious and is not the case in many organizations: the invoice goes to procurement, the decision is made in the team.

At its core are three recurring steps: make it visible who owns which cost, assess the biggest levers, and measure the effect after the change.

How you notice it

  • The cloud bill goes to procurement while architecture decisions happen in the team.
  • Nobody can say which team causes which share.
  • Cost only comes up when the bill crosses a threshold.

Frequently asked

Where do you start with FinOps?

With attribution, not with saving. As long as it is unclear which cost belongs to which team and application, every measure stays a management topic. Once attribution exists, teams decide themselves, because they can see the effect of their architecture.

Read moreHidden architecture costs on AWS