FinOps
Also known as: cloud financial management, cloud cost optimization
FinOps is the practice of bringing financial accountability to cloud spend — combining engineering, finance, and business stakeholders to make data-driven trade-offs between cost, speed, and quality.
Detailed explanation
FinOps treats cloud cost as a shared responsibility. Engineers, finance, and product teams collaborate on visibility (who spent what), optimization (right-sizing, commitments, idle cleanup), and operate (forecasting, budgets, anomaly response).
Concrete practices include showback or chargeback dashboards, Reserved Instances and Savings Plans strategy, spot/preemptible usage for batch, storage tiering, network egress optimization, and architectural reviews focused on unit economics.
Mature FinOps programs measure cost per unit of business value (cost per request, cost per customer) rather than absolute spend. The goal is not to minimize spend — it is to spend efficiently for the value delivered.