The Biannual Cloud Cost Panic Meeting
This post is part of my Medium blog.
The FinOps world has been through a transformation, and before I get into it I want to deal with the name, because the name was always a little weird. I was there when it arrived. JR Storment and Mike Fuller published the O'Reilly book, Cloud FinOps, and I remember my first reaction being ambivalence. I didn't like the name. It sounded like a product manager had coined it in a focus group. But it stuck, and I have to admit it was a good name, because everyone was doing this work long before anyone called it anything. Cloud bills needed reading before the word existed, the same way gravity worked before Newton. I recommend buying the book even if the topic seems dedicated to a niche. It isn't. It's been updated, JR and Mike have kept it current, and there's a whole community behind it now.
But that's not what this post is about.
The transformation I want to talk about is this: when FinOps was new, most executives didn't view it as a discipline that needed to be understood, supported, and developed. It was literally a meeting. Two or three times a year, the CTO looks around the room and begs people to pay attention to what they're spending on the cloud. That's it. That was the whole thing.
Redundant, the first book, has that meeting. And I want to be clear about what that scene is, because it's not a scene about one company. It's not about me, and it's not a documentary about any single place I've worked. It captures the dynamics: somebody who runs a FinOps function gets pulled into a room because his job, that day, is to get senior-level executives in trouble for not doing theirs. I can tell you from experience that meeting is a little exhausting. You're two or three levels below everyone else in the room, you've been flown across a continent to be there, and the whole meeting exists because nobody upstairs was looking at the number until the number got scary.
There's a reason it was built that way. FinOps is not an executive role. There is no VP of FinOps in most companies. There might be one at a bank, where most people at that level are VPs of something. Usually the discipline lives lower in the org, and the meeting is where they pull that person up into the room, because for about a decade cloud was lift-and-shift. Moving to public cloud meant taking whatever you were running and running it as fast as possible, and the bill was tomorrow's problem. Nobody put spend direction on the org chart. So the discipline became a ritual instead of a function, and rituals get scheduled.
So the book has the scene. The summons arrives the night before. The hero gets bcc'd on the invite, which is how he knows he's the surprise guest. He's on a 5 a.m. flight out of Vancouver because the CTO needs bodies in the room, and the meeting is held in the Network Operations Center — booked there because the wall of live screens makes the charts look serious. He has a private name for the whole cycle: Groundhog Day. Before he even opens his laptop the jokes start. FinOps prosecutor. Cost cop. Cloud sheriff. He's heard every version for years, and he understands exactly what the jokes are. The people making them know they're about to be called out, and the easiest way to pretend that isn't happening is to make the messenger the punchline before he's said a word. Everyone performs concern. Someone promises an action plan by Friday. Someone blames tagging, the same complaint he's been hearing for nine years. The waste is real, but the ritual gives everyone a place to stand while pretending they didn't help build the problem.
And here's my argument, if your company still runs this meeting. It's an anti-pattern. You should not need a panic meeting at the highest level of the company to notice cloud spend. The whole point of the field's transformation — the reason it stopped being a niche and became a discipline — is that spend shouldn't be an event. It should be baked into the daily routine. People need to be looking at spend, and the direction of spend, every day. What went up. What went down. Who owns it. That's the habit. Not a summit. Not a quarterly fear ritual with charts behind you that look serious.
If the only time your company sees its cloud bill is when someone flies in to hold up the scary graph, you don't have FinOps. You have a fire drill with a dress code.
The books are there, if you want them.