FinOps Weekly Podcast

Discover how an open-source, data-driven FinOps assessment is redefining cloud financial management, inspired by NIST and built by the FinOps community.

We also discuss:
- Why FinOps and cybersecurity practices have so much in common
- How NIST inspired a new approach to FinOps assessments
- The challenges of creating objective FinOps scores
- How professionals can contribute to an open-source FinOps project
- Why you don't need to be a software developer to contribute
- How open source can help FinOps professionals grow their careers
- The benefits of a vendor-neutral FinOps assessment
- How the assessment can be used by consultants and companies
- The upcoming beta launch at the FinOps Weekly Summit

Discover how to manage AI costs, allocate AI spending, set effective budgets, and measure AI ROI. Rick Haggard from nOps explains the AI cost journey, governance, optimization, and how to connect AI spending with real business outcomes.

Discover why organizations need to move beyond cost control and focus on AI business value, cost per task, AI observability, governance, and strategic decision-making.

We speak with Andre Lambert, FinOps Lead at H&M Group, about AI Economics, AI cost optimization, FinOps, business value, AI governance, and the future of AI spending.

We sit down with AWS experts Adam and Loïc to discuss AI cost optimization on AWS and how FinOps practices can help organizations gain visibility, allocate spend, and improve the efficiency of their AI workloads.

We explore Breaking Silos in FinOps and how organizations can bring Engineering, Product, Finance, FinOps and Leadership together to improve cloud cost management.

Tony Kostov, FinOps Lead at Netcetera, shares practical insights on how to break organizational silos, increase cloud cost visibility, build accountability and create a FinOps culture that actually works.

Learn how to optimize AWS security costs without compromising protection. AWS expert Ihor breaks down common setup errors, FinOps alignment, and budget-friendly AI security strategies.

Enter the Summit: https://finopsweekly.com/finops-weekly-summit/#register2give

Discover how Cost Goblin enables local AWS cost analysis without additional infrastructure, third-party tools, or per-user dashboard costs. In this Summit Series interview, Victor speaks with Etienne, the creator of this open-source tool powered by DuckDB.

Enter the Summit: https://finopsweekly.com/finops-weekly-summit/#register

Learn how FinOps is evolving to tackle AI cost management and tokenomics. Discover actionable strategies for prompt engineering, model right-sizing, and cost governance across non-technical teams.

00:00 AI Meets FinOps
00:49 Tokenomics Explained
04:38 Guardrails and Shadow AI
07:11 Measuring Value and ROI
09:56 Volatility Like Serverless
11:59 Prompt Engineering Basics
15:27 Instructions Skills and Context
18:23 Caching and Model Right Sizing
22:29 Training and Showback
28:45 Wrap Up and Future Outlook

How to Choose the Right AI Model on GCP Without Blowing Your Budget in 2025. In this FinOps Weekly episode, we sit down with Bar to break down how to select the best AI model on Google Cloud's Vertex AI (now Agent Platform), balancing pricing, performance, and business use cases.

Timestamps

00:00 - Intro to FinOps Weekly & Today's Topic
01:20 - Why AI Cost Management Matters Now
03:20 - AI Availability: Everyone Touches It (Unlike Cloud)
05:20 - Beyond Price: Key Factors in Model Selection
07:00 - Target Audience & Use Case Considerations
09:20 - What is Vertex AI (Now Agent Platform)?
10:50 - Exploring Model Garden & Industry Filters
13:20 - Evaluation Phase: Staging Your Models
15:00 - Newest Model vs Cheapest Model Myth
17:00 - Case Study: Pricier Models Can Cost Less
19:20 - Tokens Aren't Universal: Image/Video/Audio Pricing
20:40 - Input vs Output Token Pricing Ratios
22:20 - The Caching Challenge in LLMs
24:00 - Best Use Cases for Caching
25:40 - Data Privacy & Fine-Tuning for Sensitive Data
28:20 - Risks of Fine-Tuning & Checkpoints
30:20 - RAG as an Alternative to Fine-Tuning
36:40 - Wrap-Up & Closing Thoughts

FinOps Meets SRE: How Site Reliability Engineering Principles Can Transform Your Cloud Cost Management Strategy in 2025.

Discover how key SRE concepts like toil, SLAs, and blameless postmortems can be applied to FinOps practices. In this episode, an SRE-turned-FinOps engineer shares practical advice on automating repetitive tasks, setting cost-based service level agreements, building a blameless cost culture, and handling telemetry data.