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Need this managed for you, not just automated?
We're also a hands-on DevOps consultancy — Kubernetes, CI/CD, and cloud infrastructure.
Need this managed for you, not just automated?
We're also a hands-on DevOps consultancy — Kubernetes, CI/CD, and cloud infrastructure.
Cloud financial management as a discipline — not a cost-cutting exercise. Based on the FinOps Foundation open framework.
The FinOps Foundation defines three iterative phases. Teams cycle through them continuously — not just once.
Gain visibility into where money is going. Allocate cost to teams, products, and environments. You cannot optimize what you cannot see.
Reduce waste and improve efficiency. Match resource supply to actual demand using reservations, autoscaling, and rightsizing.
Embed cost accountability into engineering culture. Automate governance so teams can move fast without generating surprise bills.
Without consistent tags, cost data is a lump sum. The FinOps Foundation recommends tagging every billable resource and enforcing mandatory tags via policy.
required-tags, deny SCPsgcp.resourceLocationsterraform plan fails if required tags absentMost production clusters are provisioned at 2–3× actual CPU/memory usage. Use AWS Compute Optimizer or GCP Recommender to surface p95 utilization data. In Kubernetes, VPA (Vertical Pod Autoscaler) in recommendation mode + Goldilocks surfaces per-workload suggestions without changing live pods.
AWS Compute Savings Plans cover EC2, Fargate, and Lambda with a 1- or 3-year hourly spend commitment. EC2 Reserved Instances apply to a specific instance type in a region. GCP Committed Use Discounts apply automatically to projects. Aim for 60–70% coverage of your baseline on-demand spend — leave 30–40% on-demand for elasticity.
Spot can save 60–90% on EC2 for stateless, fault-tolerant workloads: CI/CD runners, batch jobs, ML training, and autoscaled node groups. Use Spot in Karpenter node pools with fallback to on-demand. Avoid Spot for stateful databases or single-replica deployments.
AWS NAT Gateway costs $0.045/GB processed — often invisible until it dominates the bill. Workloads pulling large container images or package updates across a NAT pay for every byte. Fix: use VPC Interface Endpoints for AWS services (S3, ECR, Secrets Manager) to bypass NAT entirely. Self-managed NAT on a t4g.small can replace a Managed NAT Gateway for most teams at ~10% of the cost.
Unattached EBS volumes, idle Elastic Load Balancers, unassociated Elastic IPs, and unused RDS instances accumulate silently. Use AWS Cost Explorer filters for 'no associated resource', or open-source tools like cloud-nuke. Enforce a nightly cleanup Lambda/Cloud Function in non-production accounts.
Kubernetes itself has no native cost view. OpenCost (CNCF sandbox project) attributes pod CPU/memory costs to namespaces using node pricing from the cloud provider API. Kubecost extends this with per-deployment cost over time, efficiency scores, and budget alerts. Both integrate with Prometheus and expose Grafana dashboards.
Raw cloud spend is a vanity metric. The FinOps Foundation emphasises unit economics: cost relative to a business driver. This connects engineering decisions to business outcomes.
Total infra cost ÷ MAURising = scaling inefficiency or growth
Compute + network ÷ total requestsTracks overprovisioned services
Infra cost ÷ completed ordersKey for e-commerce / payment platforms
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