CLOUDY MUSINGS

Everybody loves AI until the invoice shows up! Not the cute "we spent a few hundred dollars experimenting" invoice that gets hand-waved away as innovation spend. I mean the kind of invoice that makes finance suddenly become deeply curious about architecture decisions they previously considered engineering trivia, while operations and/or product teams insist everything is still technically a pilot, and leadership starts asking whether we can "optimize this" as though that thou

Infrastructure changes have a way of producing unexpected side effects! (a.k.a. gather around for another lively lesson learned the hard way...) Sometimes it's a routing issue that doesn't surface until something tries to use the affected path. Sometimes it's a service dependency that nobody documented because it always just worked. And sometimes it's discovering that cloud management platforms don't automatically resume where they left off after you've changed the environmen

As with previous blog posts, all code can be found here! The Norns sat beside the Well of Urd weaving fate into the roots of Yggdrasil. The thread was already spun long before anyone knew how the story would end, and by the time the consequences arrived, they were simply discovering decisions that had already been made. I found myself thinking about that recently (HUGE Norse mythology fan) after yet another conversation about cloud billing, because the parallels are stronger

More and more, I'm finding that I'm getting asked a series of similar questions when a customer decides to pick up a Cloud Solution Provider or switches between a Cloud Solution Provider for Microsoft. It starts with a: "What happens to our tenant? Do we lose our identities? Does someone have to rebuild Entra ID?" The short answer is no. The longer answer is the rest of this post, because while nothing dramatic happens to your tenant, plenty of small things change at the bill

After spending years working across Azure, AWS, and GCP, I can tell you the most frustrating part of FinOps is rarely the optimization itself. The hard part is getting everyone in the room to agree on what the data actually means before anyone can act. Every provider exports billing differently, every tool invents its own abstraction layer on top of that, and every dashboard ends up starting with translation instead of analysis. You spend the first hour of every cost conversa

I posted my FinOps for AI badge last week and almost immediately started getting messages. The interesting thing was most of them weren't actually about AI. A few people wanted to know whether the certification was worth pursuing, but most of the questions were really about the broader FinOps certification journey. Where does FinOps for AI fit? Should somebody take Engineer first? Is Practitioner still the right starting point? What's the deal with FOCUS? Is Professional wort