Glossary Term

FinOps

Updated · 1 min read

FinOps (Financial Operations) is the discipline of applying financial accountability to the on-demand, variable-cost nature of cloud infrastructure. It combines culture, process, and tooling to ensure that cloud investment is visible, measured, and optimised continuously.

The FinOps Lifecycle

  • Inform — Achieve full visibility: resource tagging, cost attribution, real-time dashboards, showback and chargeback models
  • Optimise — Eliminate waste: rightsize compute, purchase Reserved Instances and Savings Plans, enable auto-scaling, clean up orphaned resources
  • Operate — Embed governance: anomaly alerts, budgets, cost-aware engineering culture, executive reporting

Core Principle

FinOps is not about cutting costs blindly — it is about ensuring every dollar of cloud spend delivers measurable business value. Teams that understand their unit economics (cost per request, cost per customer) make better architectural decisions than teams that optimise in isolation.

Common Quick Wins

Savings Plans and Reserved Instances (30–60% discount), rightsizing over-provisioned RDS instances, routing S3/DynamoDB traffic through free VPC Gateway Endpoints, and enabling S3 Intelligent-Tiering for data with unpredictable access patterns.

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