Tools: Solved: Help Us Understand Finops Maturity & Cloud Cost Challenges

Posted on Feb 25

• Originally published at wp.me

TL;DR: Cloud cost overruns stem from poor visibility and lack of ownership, exemplified by forgotten high-cost instances. The solution involves a multi-pronged FinOps approach, combining automated cleanup scripts, proactive policy-as-code guardrails, and fundamental organizational shifts towards showback and chargeback for sustained financial accountability.

Struggling with runaway cloud costs and immature FinOps practices? This guide, from a Senior DevOps Engineer, breaks down the real reasons for cloud waste and offers three concrete solutions, from quick scripts to permanent cultural shifts, to get your spending under control.

I remember the Monday morning Slack message from Finance like it was yesterday: “Darian, can you explain this AWS spike?” I opened the billing console, and my stomach dropped. A developer, trying to test a new ML model, had spun up a p4d.24xlarge EC2 instance on Friday afternoon for a “quick test” and promptly forgotten about it. Over a single weekend, that one instance had racked up a five-figure bill. We hadn’t set up any guardrails, alerts, or ownership policies. It was a free-for-all, and we were paying for it—literally.

This isn’t a unique story. I see it play out in Reddit threads and hear it from colleagues constantly. Teams are handed the keys to the cloud kingdom with immense power to innovate, but without the financial literacy or guardrails to do it responsibly. That’s the core of the FinOps maturity struggle. It’s not about being cheap; it’s about being efficient and accountable.

Before we jump into solutions, you have to understand the root cause. The problem isn’t (usually) malicious developers trying to bankrupt the company. The problem is a toxic combination of two things:

Fixing this isn’t just about finding zombie servers. It’s about fundamentally changing how your teams interact with the cloud. Here are three ways to tackle it, from a band-aid to a cure.

This is the reactive, “stop the bleeding” approach. You’re not fixing the culture, but you are stopping the immediate waste. The idea is to build automated janitorial services that hunt for and terminate untagged, abandoned, or oversized resources.

We did this with a simple AWS Lambda function, triggered by EventBridge on a nightly schedule. It scanned all EC2 instances and RDS databases in our dev accounts. If a resource was missing an owner tag or a ttl (Time To Live) tag, it wo

Source: Dev.to