Concept / Term · Established
Technology financial operations practice
A collaborative operating framework for engineering, finance and business teams to maximise technology value and create financial accountability.
Field note
FinOps is a collaborative operating practice for making the variable cost of cloud services visible, accountable and connected to product and business decisions.
The name combines finance and operations, echoing DevOps. It emerged because cloud spending happens continuously through technical choices rather than only through occasional central purchases.
Engineering, finance and product teams allocate costs, track usage, forecast demand and act on waste while preserving the speed and flexibility cloud provides.
Cloud cost is often a direct consequence of architecture and usage, so finance cannot optimise it effectively without engineering context.
In a sentence“FinOps showed that an idle test environment was running at production scale all weekend.”