CLOUDY MUSINGS

I have watched some version of this play out enough times now that it almost feels like a rite of passage for organizations trying to mature their engineering operations. The symptoms are usually familiar. Incidents are happening too often, engineers are burned out, on-call has become something people dread, leadership wants fewer escalations, and somewhere in the middle of all that, someone says, “We need an SRE.” From there, a requisition gets approved, somebody smart gets

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