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Your LLM Has a Spending Problem - How Prompts, Context Windows, and Agent Loops Quietly Torch Your Budget

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

Shannon

5 days ago12 min read

Fresher Is Not Faster - Why Cloud Costs Refuse to Show Up in Real Time!

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

Shannon

Jun 2610 min read

What to Expect When You're Expecting Direct CSP with Microsoft

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

Shannon

Jun 1517 min read

So You Want a FinOps Certification? Here's What I Usually Tell Folks!

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

Shannon

Jun 58 min read

The CAP Theorem Is Why Your Cloud App Sometimes Feels Off

There is a moment every cloud engineer seemingly has, whether they admit it or not. You open an application and something feels strange. A record you just saved is not there yet, a dashboard shows two different answers depending on where you look, or a system insists an action never happened even though you just performed it. At some point, a smart sounding person says “eventual consistency,” everyone nods, and the conversation moves on without anyone actually feeling satisfi

Shannon

Feb 154 min read

FinOps Is Not About Saving Money. It Is About Asking Better Questions.

Somewhere along the way, FinOps picked up a bad reputation. I had a customer tell me they viewed FinOps as akin to security. I felt it was a bad comparison, as most FinOps teams I work with, plus customers who have aspirations to build a FinOps team, are just trying to optimize + make cloud cost management more transparent to the organization. For a lot of teams though, it shows up as a dashboard no one asked for, a budget alert that fires too late, a preventative guardrail t

Shannon

Jan 178 min read

Conway’s Law: What Your Cloud Team Can Learn from Stressed Out Kitchen Staff

I was reminded of Conway’s Law the day I watched an episode of The Bear where Carmy tried to redesign the entire kitchen workflow in the middle of lunch service. Onions were flying. Pans were screaming. Richie yelled “cousin” every twelve seconds. Sydney was five seconds away from either fixing everything or throwing a stainless steel pan into the alley. Half the staff looked like one more missed step would send them into a new career that involved silence and scented candles

Shannon

Nov 12, 20255 min read