FinOps & process
FinOps
The practice of managing cloud, and increasingly AI, spend as a shared job between finance and engineering, on an ongoing schedule.
Last updated
Definition
FinOps treats cost the way SRE treats reliability. It is a discipline with its own metrics, review schedule, and shared ownership. Engineering spends the money and finance accounts for it. A finance-only audit once a quarter is not FinOps. The core loop is simple. Normalize spend into one view that everyone trusts. Review it on a fixed schedule. Act on what drifts. It scales down to one rotating owner as well as it scales up to a dedicated platform team.
The discipline began with cloud infrastructure spend. It applies just as well to AI and LLM API spend, which is usage-based in the same way. AI spend needs the same visibility and the same schedule, at a faster pace, because it can move quickly.
Where it shows up
FinOps shows up as a recurring review of a normalized cost view. This is usually a dashboard or report that finance and engineering can both see and act on. The team checks it on a fixed schedule. It is not a once-a-quarter audit run by one side of the business alone.
What makes it expensive
Cost review is often a finance-only exercise once a quarter. It then misses spend that grew and shrank again between reviews, with nobody watching. Buying a dashboard is the easy part. The schedule and the named owner turn a dashboard into a practice.
Related
The invoice is a lagging signal.
A monthly invoice tells you what already happened. CostMon builds a daily baseline, so a spike stands out while you can still act on it.