I went to the FinOps X conference in San Diego expecting AI to play a major role. My review of the vendors with booths told the story. Whether it be agents exploring optimization in conventional finops, adding token costs to…
Fifty-seven companies paid for booth space at FinOps X 2026 in San Diego, June 8 through 11. This is a field guide to what those sponsorships reveal. Taken individually, each is a marketing decision. Taken together, they are a market…
FinOps X 2026 will be held in San Diego next week, and I’m going. I’ve been around this discipline since before it had a name, and the run-up to the conference motivated me to sit down and work through how…
S3 Standard storage has been $0.023/GB to start since December 2016. AWS announced 107 price reductions between 2006 and 2021. The early reductions were significant because the early prices were high. Cloud was new, scale was small, and the providers…
I’m going hard today. Collating over 100 recent articles on the FinOps space and aggregating them down to a handful of select topics, this one stood out to me like a sore thumb, screaming for attention. This is going to…
AWS says Graviton4 delivers 30% better price-performance than comparable its previous generation. That number is real under the benchmark conditions AWS used to generate it. The more honest question is what “30% better price-performance” means for your workload under your…
FinOps Shift Left: Ounce of Prevention, Pound of Cure Build errors show up in your terminal in seconds. Cost errors show up in your budget four weeks later. By then the architectural decision that caused the overspend is three sprints…
I’ve never been woken up at 2am because of Spot. That needs context, because without it, it sounds like a brag. I’ve been paged plenty. Or called. Pagers are a bit dated. You get the point. Editing configs on an…
I built a system at Adobe called Spot Stack. It was tiered infrastructure provisioned by Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs) that delivered EC2 resources to a pre-Kubernetes container platform. It managed capacity well, and did so at the lowest cost possible.…
