Updated 25 October 2026 · Published by Zoorik
FinOps is a practice where finance, engineering and business teams share ownership of cloud spend. The FinOps meaning is in its name: finance plus DevOps. Microsoft says its goal isn’t to save money, but to get more business value from the cloud.
In simple terms, each team owns its cloud cost. The FinOps Framework, from the FinOps Foundation, splits the work into three phases that repeat:
- Inform shows each team what it spends.
- Optimize makes cloud use more efficient, for example by stopping idle resources.
- Operate tracks goals and sets rules.
An example: idle developer machines
Microsoft’s FinOps guidance suggests three steps for developer virtual machines (VMs):
- Tag each resource with its environment, such as development.
- Stop each developer VM off-peak with a script if it wasn’t used in 2 hours.
- Expect storage charges to continue while it’s stopped.
FinOps in Azure and AWS
Microsoft bases its Azure FinOps guidance largely on the FinOps Framework. To track spend, it points you to Microsoft Cost Management. AWS has a similar framework, Cloud Financial Management, with four pillars: see, save, plan and run.
Why it matters for your bill
- Reports alone don’t reduce cloud costs. The bill goes down when you change what runs, or the rate you pay for it.
- Coral rebalances CPU and memory requests on AKS and EKS to match real use, so the same pods fit on fewer nodes.
- Amoeba moves a VM’s data disks onto one pool sized to your data, then rightsizes it autonomously.
- The free assessment works out your own figure.
Read next: How to reduce cloud costs: what moves the bill
Sources: Microsoft Learn, “What is FinOps?” (opens in a new tab); Microsoft Learn, “FinOps Framework overview” (opens in a new tab); Microsoft Learn, “Workload optimization” (opens in a new tab); AWS, “Practice Cloud Financial Management” (opens in a new tab).