Cloud technologies have changed the way companies work with IT infrastructure. If before the purchase of servers required months of planning, budget approval and capital investments, now any developer can launch a virtual machine or a machine learning service in just a couple of clicks. This opens up incredible opportunities for business: quick launch of projects, flexible scaling, access to advanced technologies without the need to build your own data centre.

However, there is a downside to this coin. The ease of launching cloud resources creates a new problem: unpredictable and uncontrollable cost growth. A developer may launch a powerful GPU server for model testing, forget to shut it down, and end up with a bill for tens or hundreds of thousands of rubles by the end of the month. A team may deploy infrastructure for a project that never goes into production, but the resources continue to run and incur expenses. A database may be overpowered for the actual workload, but no one checks its utilisation.

According to Flexera research, about 45% of companies regularly exceed their cloud services budget, and 28% of all cloud spending is considered inefficient. For many organisations, the cloud has transformed from a tool of flexibility into a source of financial problems and conflicts between departments. The finance department sees increasing bills without understanding what the company is paying for, while the IT department and developers do not want restrictions that deprive the cloud of its main advantages, such as speed and flexibility.

It is to solve this problem that the practice of FinOps (Financial Operations) emerged – a comprehensive approach to cloud spend management that integrates financial, technical, and business processes. FinOps is not just a money-saving tool, it is a way to make cloud spend transparent, predictable, and optimal for business goals.

FinOps (short for Financial Operations) is a cultural practice and a set of methodologies for managing cloud spend. The main idea is to bring together three key groups in the company — financiers, engineers, and business leaders — to manage cloud investments together.
The main principles of FinOps are:
Distributed responsibility. Instead of having a single department responsible for optimising cloud costs, everyone who uses the cloud is responsible for it. Each team is aware of the financial implications of their technical decisions.

Cost transparency. Everyone involved has access to up-to-date information about costs and can see how their actions affect the budget.

Centralised management. With distributed responsibility, there is a FinOps centre of competence that coordinates processes, sets standards, and provides training.

A balance of speed, cost, and quality. FinOps does not advocate saving at any cost. The goal is to find the optimal balance between performance, reliability, and cost.

A focus on business value. Cloud service selection decisions are made based on their contribution to achieving business goals, rather than solely on cost reduction.

The FinOps practice is built around three iterative stages that are constantly repeated:
1. Informing (Inform)
At this stage, the company collects data on the use of cloud resources and forms an understanding of the current situation:

• Setting up the collection of metrics and generating reports on expenses
• Allocating costs by projects, teams, and business units
• Creating dashboards for different roles (financiers, developers, and managers)
• Identifying trends and anomalies in expenses
• Implementing showback/chargeback models to increase awareness

2. Optimisation (Optimise)
Based on the collected data, the team identifies opportunities for improvement and implements them:

• Analysis of resource utilisation and identification of unused capacities
• Proper selection of instance types and services for real tasks
• Use of reserved instances and savings plans for long-term loads
• Automation of resource on/off during non-working hours
• Optimisation of application architecture based on cost considerations

3. Management (Operate)
The stages of integrating FinOps into the company's operational processes:

• Setting up policies and rules for the use of cloud resources
• Implementation of budget limits and alerts when they are exceeded
• Regular reviews of expenses and the efficiency of optimizations
• Training of teams in cloud financial literacy
• Continuous improvement of processes based on feedback

It is important to understand that FinOps is not a project with a completion date, but an ongoing practice. The cloud landscape is changing, new services are emerging, provider tariffs are changing, and business needs are growing and transforming. Therefore, the cycle of informing, optimising, and managing must be repeated constantly.

Practical cases of FinOps implementation

Case 1: E-commerce company optimises costs for peak loads
Situation: A large e-commerce company migrated to the cloud to cope with sharp traffic spikes during sales and holiday seasons. The model was simple: developers got access to the cloud with minimal restrictions to ensure flexibility. Six months later, the CFO discovered that monthly cloud expenses had tripled and continued to grow, while there was no understanding of the cost structure.

Problems:

• Lack of visibility: it's unclear who is spending money on what
• The infrastructure deployed for Black Friday continued to run all year round
• Teams ran excessively powerful instances "just in case"
• Test and dev environments were running 24/7, although they were only used during business hours
• There were many "forgotten" resources: disks that were not attached to VMs, and unused load balancers

FinOps solution: The company has created a cross-functional FinOps team that includes a financial analyst, a DevOps engineer, and representatives from key product teams.

The first step was to implement tagging of all resources by project, environment (prod/stage/dev), and team. This allowed for a detailed view of expenses.

The second step was to create automation for managing the lifecycle of resources:

• Scripts for automatically disabling dev/test environments during non-working hours (saving ~65% of working hours)
• Autoscaling for production loads with real metrics tuning
• Automatic deletion of old snapshots and unattached disks

The third step is to optimise instance types and use reserved capacity for the base constant load, and spot instances for processing peaks.

Results:

• Reduced costs by 32% in the first 3 months
• Reduced the time of non-production environments by 70%
• Implemented a cost-conscious culture: each team sees their costs and has a budget
• Improved cost predictability: forecast accuracy increased from 40% to 85%
• The ability to reinvest the saved funds in the development of new products

Case 2: A fintech startup puts its "wild" cloud in order
Situation: A fast-growing fintech startup has grown from 10 to 100 people in two years. At the beginning of the journey, several developers had full access to the cloud and created infrastructure "on the fly" to meet the needs of the business. This ensured the speed of product launch, but by the time of raising the B round, investors sounded the alarm: cloud expenses were 18% of the turnover, with an industry standard of 6-8%, and it was impossible to predict them.

Problems:

• Chaotic infrastructure: resources were created by different people without a single standard
• Lack of accountability: it was unclear who was responsible for which resources
• Multiple duplications: different teams created similar services independently
• Test databases on production configurations
• Logs and metrics without product lifecycle management, taking up terabytes of expensive storage

FinOps solution: The startup hired a FinOps engineer and started systematisation.

Phase 1: Inventory and tagging (2 weeks)

• Conducted a full inventory of all resources
• Contacted resource owners via Slack and added mandatory tags
• Identified "orphans" - resources without an owner
• Created a mandatory tagging policy for new resources

Stage 2: Quick Wins (1 month)

• Removed unused resources (12% savings)
• Set up automatic deletion of old logs and backups (5% savings)
• Reduced the size of test databases (8% savings)
• Set up dev environments to auto-stop outside of business hours (7% savings)

Stage 3: Structural Changes (3 months)

• Implemented Infrastructure as Code for all new resources
• Created a library of approved configurations for typical tasks
• Implemented a review process for expensive infrastructure changes
• Set up monitoring of anomalies in expenses with auto-alerts

Stage 4: Cultural changes (continuously)

• Weekly FinOps metrics at team meetings
• Gamification: recognition of teams that use resources most efficiently
• Training sessions for developers on the cost of cloud services

Results:

• Overall cost reduction of 42% in six months
• Cloud spend as a percentage of revenue decreased to 9% (target 6-8% in the next quarter)
• Monthly forecast accuracy improved to 92%
• A clear accountability model emerged: each resource has an accountable person
• Faster decision-making: cost data is available during planning

Case 3: A large corporation synchronises its multi-cloud strategy
Situation: An international manufacturing company used cloud services from several providers: AWS for core applications, Azure for Office 365 and internal systems, and Google Cloud for ML/AI projects. Different divisions in different countries operated independently, with each region having its own contracts and cloud management approaches.

Problems:

• Inability to consolidate cost data from different clouds
• Different levels of optimisation: some divisions actively managed their costs, while others did not
• Lost opportunities for corporate discounts
• Security risks due to the lack of unified standards
• Duplication of costs for similar functionality in different clouds

FinOps solution: The corporation has created a centralised FinOps team at headquarters with regional representatives.

Unification and visibility:

• Implementation of a single platform for monitoring expenses in all clouds
• Creation of a unified tagging system adapted to the organisational structure
• Consolidation of billing through an Enterprise Agreement with major providers

Standardisation of processes:

• Development of corporate standards for typical scenarios (web applications, databases, analytics)
• Creation of a centralised catalog of approved services and configurations
• Implementation of an approval process for non-standard solutions

Competence centres:

• Creation of a Cloud Centre of Excellence for sharing best practices between regions
• Weekly meetings of regional FinOps leaders
• Internal knowledge base with optimisation cases

Automation and control:

• Budget control policies with automatic project-level alerts
• Automated optimisation recommendations tailored to the company's specific needs
• Centralised procurement of reserved instances with distribution among departments

Results:

• 27% savings through consolidation and corporate discounts
• Reduced financial reporting time from 2 weeks to 2 days
• Identified and eliminated $1.2M in duplicate expenses
• Accelerated knowledge sharing: successful practices from one region are quickly replicated
• Improved compliance and security regulations through unified standards

Typical mistakes when implementing FinOps and how to avoid them

Error 1: Focus only on savings. FinOps is not about spending less — but about spending effectively. If the company is growing, the cloud costs should also grow. The main metric is a single economy: how much the cloud costs per user, per transaction or per ruble of revenue.

Error 2: Excessive control killing innovation. Too rigid restrictions and lengthy approval processes deprive the cloud of its main advantage — flexibility. The best approach is to give freedom within reasonable limits with transparent visibility of the consequences.

Error 3: Technical solutions without changing the culture. Implementing monitoring and automation is important, but it is not enough. Without changing the culture and understanding of financial responsibility by the teams, the effect will be temporary.

Error 4: Trying to implement everything at once. FinOps is an iterative practice. Start with quick wins (removing unused resources, basic tagging), show the results, get support, and move on.

Error 5: Lack of responsibility for the practice. FinOps requires a process owner — a person or team that coordinates efforts. Without this, the practice becomes blurred and loses effectiveness.

In today's world, cloud technologies have become a critical part of IT infrastructure. Companies that have learned to effectively manage their cloud expenses gain a significant competitive advantage. They can:

• Launch new products faster with the flexibility of the cloud, without fear of overspending
• Reinvest the saved funds in innovation and development
• Make informed decisions based on data about the real cost of services
• Scale without a proportional increase in infrastructure costs

FinOps is not a set of tools or a position in an organization. It is a culture of financial responsibility for cloud usage that is distributed across the company. It is an ongoing dialogue between finance, engineering, and business about how to maximize the value of cloud investments.

You can start your journey to a mature FinOps practice by setting up a responsible person, configuring basic cost visibility, inventorying resources, and achieving small wins. Every step will bring you closer to a state where the cloud is truly working for your business, rather than becoming a financial black hole. Remember, the success of FinOps is not just measured by the percentage of budget saved, but also by the company's ability to use the cloud to achieve its business goals faster, more efficiently, and with less risk.