From Journey to Practice: FinOps and Cloud Economics

CLOUD COST IS A BUSINESS DECISION. Spending well is not always spending less.

The bill grew 62% in six months. Listeners grew only 15%. That gap is what brings engineering, finance and product together around cloud cost at Listening Post, a fictional podcast platform.

This course book shows how to make cost decisions continuously, linking spending to the value delivered. It does not promise to cut costs: sometimes spending well means spending more.

You will learn to: understand what drives each part of the bill and who decides about it; allocate costs by team and product, with tags and allocation rules; set budgets, investigate anomalies and remove waste safely; compare architectures, purchase options and TCO with explicit assumptions; communicate unit costs and results to leadership.

4 case studies, 20 diagrams, more than 30 labs (two on AWS, with cost alerts and cleanup, and four in Python on your own machine), checklists and exercises with an answer key. All values are fictional.

About the author: André Romão Quinhoneiro has worked in IT since 2003. He is a DevOps Engineer at Broto, where he takes care of AWS infrastructure and information security. He holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and a graduate specialization in Cloud Computing Projects.