FinOps Framework for Executives: What matters and what to do
Key term: FinOps - an operating model that helps finance, engineering, and product teams work together to get maximum business value from cloud spend.
Most teams look at the cloud bill as a liability. High-performing teams use cloud as strategic business asset. FinOps gives you the rhythm and roles to do that. You do not need a new tool first. You need shared language, clear owners, and a small set of metrics that drive decisions.
The executive lens
FinOps is built around three simple motions that repeat over and over. Your job is to make each motion real with ownership and a cadence.
- Inform - Make spend visible and meaningful. Map costs to the way you run the business: products, teams, environments. Replace “Why is AWS up 12%?” with “Why did Checkout Service cost per order rise last week?”
- Optimize - Turn insights into actions. Right-size, turn off idle, pick cheaper compute instances, choose managed services, and get commitments right. Tie actions to clear owners and a date to verify results.
- Operate - Keep value on track. Review the same few KPIs monthly, adjust budgets and forecasts, and refine policies like tagging, commitments, and anomaly response.
What to measure (keep it short)
Key term: RI (Reserved Instance) - way to get discount on cloud compute resources through longer usage commitments (1-3 years).
Pick three metrics you will live with for the next quarter. Examples:
- Allocation coverage - share of spend that is tagged or attributed to an owner.
- Forecast accuracy - how close your 30- or 60-day forecast is to actuals.
- Commitment coverage - percent of steady workloads covered by Savings Plans or RIs.
- Optional, when you are ready: Unit cost - cost per transaction, user, build minute, or GB processed.
Roles you must name
- Executive sponsor - removes blockers and approves guardrails.
- FinOps lead - runs the cadence, curates dashboards, and chases owners.
- Engineering owners - service leads who commit to actions and report status.
- Finance partner - aligns forecasts, budgets, and capitalization rules.
Guardrails that prevent rework
Key term: CI/CD - a process for quickly building and delivering software to users/customers.
- Tagging and project hygiene - decide the minimal set of keys (
owner,env,service) and enforce them in CI/CD. - Change review - add cost questions to architecture and release reviews.
- Commitment policy - define how and when you buy or adjust Savings Plans and RIs.
- Anomaly playbook - who gets paged, what threshold, what first steps.
Common traps
- Chasing “savings” without owners or a verify date.
- Reporting 20 charts instead of 3 KPIs the business understands.
- Treating FinOps as a finance project. It is a product and platform habit.
Quick action
In your next leadership sync, do this simple reset:
- Name the FinOps lead and confirm the executive sponsor.
- Agree on your three KPIs from the list above and write them at the top of your cost dashboard.
- Schedule a monthly 45-minute cloud value review with the FinOps lead, platform lead, and finance partner.
Close the loop fast. When you can attribute spend, act on it, and review outcomes on a steady beat, cloud costs stop being noise and start becoming a lever for speed and margin.
AWS Well-Architected Cost Optimization Pillar
Key term: AWS Cost Optimization Pillar - the AWS framework that helps you design and run workloads that deliver business value at the lowest price point.
Start with design choices, not dashboards. The Cost Optimization pillar is a set of first principles you can use to shape how teams build, scale, and review workloads. It treats cost as an outcome of design and operations, not a monthly fire drill. In AWS’s words, the goal is to deliver business value at the lowest price point across the workload lifecycle.
The five principles in plain words
- Implement cloud financial management - make cost data part of everyday engineering decisions.
- Adopt a consumption model - pay for what you use, when you use it.
- Measure overall efficiency - track business output per dollar, not just raw spend.
- Stop spending on generic heavy lifting - prefer managed services so teams ship features, not operate plumbing.
- Analyze and attribute expenditure - tag and allocate costs to owners so tradeoffs are clear.
Where leaders step in
Treat these principles as policy, then back them with a light process:
- Put cost questions in design reviews - before launch, ask how this service scales, how it will be turned off when idle, and which commitments fit steady load.
- Standardize autoscaling and right-sizing - make guardrails the default in platform templates.
- Run Well-Architected Reviews on top spenders - quarterly, for the 3 highest cost workloads, to surface risks and actions.
- Use managed services by default - only run it yourself when it gives a clear edge.
Signals you are doing it right
You see fewer idle resources, commit coverage goes up, unit cost trends become stable, and teams propose design changes that lower cost without hurting reliability or speed. Reviews stop being audits and start being design conversations anchored on the five principles.
One-line example: Coinbase
Coinbase set up a Cloud Center of Excellence to set standards and ownership. They moved key services to AWS Graviton compute and Amazon EKS to make efficient scaling the default. They also ran regular Well-Architected reviews to find and fix waste. Together, these moves cut cloud infrastructure costs by 62% and improved scaling speed.
Quick move
Pick one high-spend workload and schedule a Well-Architected Review focused only on the Cost pillar. Walk through the official questions, capture 3 fixes, and assign owners with verify dates. Repeat next quarter for the next workload.
The takeaway: you do not need fifty new dashboards. You need a clear stance on design, a short list of questions you always ask, and a rhythm to revisit the answers. When leaders make the Cost pillar visible in design and review, cost stops drifting and starts compounding into margin and speed.
Azure Well-Architected Cost Optimization - Turn guidance into platform habits
Key term: Azure Cost Optimization pillar - the Azure Well-Architected guidance that helps you design and run workloads to deliver value at the lowest cost without hurting reliability or performance.
Treat cost as a design choice, not a month-end surprise. The Azure Well-Architected Framework makes this explicit: cost is one of five pillars used to shape decisions before, during, and after build. Use the pillar to set guardrails and cadence, then let teams work within them.
Three design moves that pay off
Key term: PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) - a service that provides teams with pre-defined environments to deploy and run software.
Make cost a non-functional requirement Add cost to every design doc and review. Ask: What will drive spend, how will it scale, and how will we switch it off when idle. Use Azure’s Cost Optimization checklist to keep the questions consistent, and capture tradeoffs you accept today and will revisit later.
Default to a consumption-first platform baseline Favor PaaS and managed services, enable autoscaling, and right-size by pattern, not by feel. The Cost Optimization design principles are written for this: design for variable load, eliminate infrastructure and platform maintenance activities, and measure workload efficiency over time. Bake these choices into your platform templates so teams get them by default.
Model cost before you ship meaningful changes A simple cost model forces clarity on expected usage, rate drivers, and likely hotspots. It also sets you up for better budgets and alerts. Azure’s guidance shows how to sketch this quickly so you can compare options and catch surprises early.
What good looks like in reviews
- Design docs include a short cost section with explicit tradeoffs and rollback triggers.
- Resource groups, tags, and subscriptions map cleanly to owners and environments so attribution is trivial.
- Budgets and alerts are active for top workloads, and the Advisor Cost Optimization workbook is checked in monthly ops.
- Teams can point to a simple cost model and show how it changed after real traffic.
- Maturity improves quarter over quarter using Azure’s Cost Optimization maturity model as a ladder, not a label.
Example - Manulife on AKS
Manulife moved more services to Azure Kubernetes Service and standardized on a managed, autoscaling baseline. Result: about 50% cost savings for the AKS environment, with faster delivery. This is the cost pillar in practice - managed services first, consistent templates, and reviews that target waste.
Leader nudge
Ask your platform lead for a one-page Azure Cost guardrails note: default services to prefer, required tags, autoscaling policy, when a cost model is needed, and the checklist you will use in reviews. Point every new workload at that page and revisit it monthly with the Well-Architected checklist.
The takeaway: the Azure pillar is not another dashboard. It is a short set of design rules, a shared checklist, and a steady review rhythm that turns cost control into a habit across teams.
Google Cloud Cost Optimization pillar
Key term: GCP Cost Optimization pillar - the Google Cloud Well-Architected guidance that helps you align spend with business value and keep optimization continuous.
Google Cloud’s cost pillar is explicit about the goal: optimize workload costs while staying aligned to business value, and do it as an ongoing practice, not a once-a-year clean up. It closely aligns with FinOps thinking and targets executives as well as architects and operators.
Make it real: one system, three instruments
Structure drives accountability. Use the Google Cloud resource hierarchy to mirror how you run the business - organizations, folders, projects - then make cost ownership visible with labels. Labels are a first-class way to attribute spend and should follow a simple, enforced policy shared by platform, finance, and product. Treat the policy like any other standard: required keys, allowed values, and where it’s validated.
Signals before actions. Stand up native signals so teams see cost and value in the same place they work. Google Cloud’s cost and usage hub covers reports, forecasting, budgets, and recommendations. Use it to spot trends, trigger alerts, and feed a lightweight monthly review - then reserve custom dashboards for a few portfolio KPIs. This keeps noise down while keeping leaders close to what matters.
Commit where the load is steady. For predictable baselines, buy Committed Use Discounts (CUDs). You commit to a level of usage or spend for 1 or 3 years and get lower rates on eligible resources. Keep the policy simple: which services are in scope, who approves, and how you track coverage and utilization in your monthly review.
Design habit: optimize continuously
Make “optimize continuously” a standing principle. In practice this means you review cost and efficiency alongside reliability and performance, accept explicit tradeoffs when needed, and revisit them as traffic and business goals change. Small, regular adjustments beat large, disruptive fixes.
Elanco’s case
Elanco built a private, secure generative AI setup on Google Cloud’s Gemini and Cortex Framework to remove manual steps in routine work. The result: $2.3M saved in year 1 and 70% less time spent on those tasks - a clean case of aligning spend to value and then optimizing operations around it.
Leader cues to look for
- Labels and project structure map cleanly to owners and environments, so allocation is trivial in reviews.
- Budgets and alerts exist for top projects, and recommendations drive real changes the next sprint.
- Commitments are tracked like a portfolio - coverage, utilization, and upcoming renewals - not as one-off purchases.
Try this once: in under 10 minutes, pull the native cost report for your top 3 projects, check for missing labels, and ask which part of each bill is stable enough to commit next quarter. This keeps the pillar grounded in how you actually run the portfolio.
FinOps vs. Cloud Provider Cost Pillars
Key term: Well-Architected Review - a structured checklist-based assessment of a workload against AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud best practices.
Executives often ask, “Should we do FinOps or focus on the cloud’s Well-Architected cost pillar?” The useful answer is not either/or. These are different tools for different layers of the same problem. FinOps is the operating model that sets owners, cadences, and business KPIs for cloud value. Provider cost pillars shape day-to-day engineering choices so workloads are efficient by design. Put simply: FinOps runs the business of cloud; the pillars steer how teams build and run the workloads that create the bill.
Where each shines
- FinOps for the organization. Use FinOps to align finance, platform, and product on shared language and a short list of KPIs. It is ideal when your biggest gaps are allocation, forecasting, commitments, or cross-team accountability. FinOps gives you the rhythm: monthly value reviews, a clear commitment policy, an anomaly playbook, and three metrics you will live with for a quarter.
- Cost pillars for the workload. Use AWS/Azure/GCP cost guidance to drive design decisions: adopt consumption models, right-size, prefer managed services, and enforce autoscaling and attribution. This is perfect when the pain lives inside architecture and operations rather than budgeting.
What is the same vs. different
Same: all aim to align spend with business value, reduce waste, and make optimization continuous.
Different: scope and artifacts. FinOps deals in owners, cadences, and portfolio KPIs. Cost pillars deal in design principles, review questions, and code or config changes. FinOps is cloud-agnostic by nature. Pillars are cloud-specific by design.
How to blend them without chaos
- Make FinOps the umbrella. Name the executive sponsor and FinOps lead. Set three KPIs and a monthly review.
- Run Well-Architected Reviews where the money is. Each quarter, review the top spenders in each cloud. Limit the agenda to cost questions and leave with three fixes per workload.
- Wire signals to actions. Cost allocation, budgets, and recommendations should feed the FinOps review so decisions turn into tickets, not slides.
- Keep one page of guardrails per cloud. List default services to prefer, required tags, autoscaling policy, and when a cost model is required. Link that page in design templates.
- Review our Executive Whatch-outs Pocket Book to apply Well-Architected cost pillar recommendations without surprises.
Anti-patterns to avoid
- Treating FinOps as a dashboard project while skipping owner assignment and review cadence.
- Running reviews as audits that produce long reports and no changes.
- Mixing clouds in one policy doc that hides real platform differences.
- Buying commitments without a utilization target or a plan to verify results.
Quick decision guide
- Pick FinOps first if you cannot cleanly attribute spend to owners, forecasts drift, or teams debate which KPIs matter.
- Lean on the pillar if designs ship without autoscaling, idle resources live for months, or cost is a surprise after release.
- Blend when you are multi-cloud or federated: FinOps for the portfolio, cost pillars for each platform’s workloads, one shared cadence to keep both in sync.
The outcome you want is a simple flywheel: FinOps sets goals and cadence, pillar reviews shape designs, and monthly reviews verify savings and reset priorities. When these layers work together, cost stops being a late report and becomes a steady, strategic lever.
