“Many CIOs have a completely justified feeling that half of their cloud costs are wasted. For example, they deployed an environment for a project and forgot to turn it off, or reserved extra capacity that sits idle,” Rylko said. “What often just irritates is the opaque billing structures from providers. Without constant monitoring and a FinOps approach, it is almost impossible to understand where exactly the money is spent.”
Rylko cited a recent client “where the developer environments worked 24/7, although the team used them only during business hours. An automated schedule to shut down environments in the evening and restart them in the morning gave savings of a double-digit percentage already in the first month.”
Rylko argued that such anecdotes are why he sees “the issue of cloud optimization is not only finances, but also development culture. If engineers do not understand that each of their VMs or containers costs money, no CFO reports will help. Effective strategies include making engineering teams accountable for spend and ensuring they understand the cost impact of their resources.”