A practice that brings engineering, finance, and business teams together to manage cloud spending and get the most value from it.
FinOps, short for cloud financial operations, emerged because cloud resources can be created instantly by engineers, making costs easy to grow and hard to track. The FinOps Foundation describes a lifecycle of three phases: inform, which makes costs visible and allocates them to teams; optimize, which reduces waste and improves pricing; and operate, which builds ongoing processes and accountability.
Common techniques include tagging resources by team and project, shutting down idle environments, right-sizing oversized servers, and buying commitment discounts for steady workloads. For example, a software company might discover that test environments run all weekend and schedule them to stop on Friday evening. FinOps is not only about spending less. Its goal is to make cost a normal part of engineering decisions, measured through metrics such as cost per customer.
A cloud feature that automatically adds or removes computing resources based on demand, so applications stay responsive without overpaying.
Cloud ComputingDelivering computing resources such as servers, storage, databases, and software over the internet on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Multi-CloudA strategy of using services from two or more public cloud providers rather than relying on a single one.
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