FinOps Foundations: Best Practices for Finance Teams

Introduction

Managing cloud costs doesn’t have to be a mystery. Finance Teams often struggle with cloud cost visibility, budget alignment, and collaboration with technical teams, and when it comes to Kubernetes, those challenges only grow due to the complexity and dynamic nature of containerization. Previously, we explored FinOps from a Product Team’s perspective. Now, we’re focusing on how Finance and Procurement Teams can apply FinOps to improve financial outcomes.

The Unique Challenges Finance Teams Face in Cloud Cost Management

Cloud spending presents unique hurdles for Finance Teams, often requiring new frameworks to track and control costs effectively. Some of the most common challenges include:

• Limited Visibility: Finance Teams often struggle to identify which teams, projects, or workloads drive cloud costs because of inconsistent tagging and a lack of real-time insights.
• Unpredictable Costs: Dynamic scaling leads to fluctuating bills, making it difficult to forecast expenses accurately. Cloud and Kubernetes costs can rise due to unforseen overprovisioning and waste.
• Budgeting and Forecasting Complexity: Cloud hosting is a significant expense, but traditional cost models lack the granularity needed to allocate resources effectively.
• Cross-Team Silos: Engineering prioritizes uptime and performance, while Finance focuses on cost control. Without a shared language and aligned goals, inefficiencies arise.

FinOps Strategies for Finance Teams

Finance Teams can leverage FinOps to bring transparency, control, and predictability to cloud and Kubernetes spending.

Here’s how they can do it:

1. Enhance Cloud Cost Visibility

To truly see cloud costs, Finance Teams must move from reactive tracking to proactive monitoring. Real-time cost monitoring tools help track usage trends and catch unexpected charges early. A structured cost allocation strategy—using tagging, chargeback, and show-back—ensures spending is assigned to the right teams, projects, or business units. By setting clear monitoring goals aligned with business priorities, Finance Teams can keep cloud costs predictable and under control.

2. Optimize Spending Without Impacting Performance

Optimizing cloud costs isn’t just about cutting expenses—it’s about getting the most value from every dollar spent. Finance Teams can play a key role in right-sizing workloads to avoid over- or under-provisioning, ensuring both cost efficiency and system performance. Removing unused resources like idle virtual machines and orphaned storage reduces waste without disrupting operations. To save even more, Finance Teams can work with Engineering to take advantage of reserved instances, spot pricing, and volume discounts. Automating cost controls with budget guardrails and real-time alerts keeps spending in check without constant manual oversight.

3. Improve Collaboration with Engineering & Procurement

Closing the gap between Finance and Engineering is key to managing cloud costs effectively. Finance Teams can improve collaboration by developing a shared language that aligns priorities and expectations. Regular FinOps reviews help financial strategies evolve alongside technical needs. A dedicated FinOps Council—with representatives from Finance, Engineering, Product, Procurement, and other stakeholders—reinforces accountability and encourages proactive cost management. Recognizing and celebrating cost efficiency wins also helps sustain engagement and momentum, making FinOps a continuous and valued practice within the organization.

Real-World Example: How Kubecost Implements FinOps

At Kubecost, we don’t just advocate for FinOps—we practice it ourselves through an internal initiative called Operation Dog Food. This project was designed to ensure that we optimize our own cloud costs, just as we help our customers do. Our goal was to gain deeper visibility into our cloud spend, implement cost-saving strategies, and foster collaboration between Finance and Engineering teams.

We started by using Kubecost Collections to group cloud costs across Kubernetes workloads and traditional resources. This gave us a clear view of hosting costs per customer, helping our team make smarter allocation decisions.

With clearer visibility, we set budgets and alerts to flag overspending. This kept teams aware of their cloud usage, reducing unnecessary cluster spin-ups and improving efficiency.

We also implemented namespace turndown and automated request right-sizing to further optimize costs. Shutting down unused namespaces at night and on weekends reduced idle costs while keeping performance intact.

These optimizations led to significant results:

• $219,000 in annualized savings
• 16.7% reduction in monthly cloud spend

Operation Dog Food had such a strong impact that it became a key focus in our FinOps meetings, where we refine strategies and find new savings opportunities. Although we practice efficiency and cost awareness in everything we do, using our own platform improved cost efficiency, strengthened collaboration, and helped us gain valuable FinOps insights.

Conclusion

By adopting FinOps practices, Finance Teams can gain greater clarity and control over cloud costs while improving collaboration with technical teams. To further explore FinOps related content, check out our previous blog posts.

Interested in bringing cost clarity to your cloud financial strategy? Try Kubecost today and start optimizing your cloud spend with real-time insights.