welcome

This book is for engineers, platform teams, FinOps practitioners, and anyone responsible for cloud costs in a growing organization. If you've ever struggled to make sense of a cloud bill, to get teams to tag their resources properly, or to explain a surprise spike in spend, this book is for you.

To get the most from this book, it helps to have some familiarity with cloud infrastructure, especially services like compute, storage, and networking in AWS, GCP, or Azure. A basic understanding of billing concepts, tagging, and cloud architecture will also make the examples easier to follow. That said, you don’t need to be a FinOps expert to start—you’ll build that knowledge as you go.

The book starts by laying down the foundations of FinOps: what it is, how it differs from basic cost optimization, and why it matters for modern cloud-native teams. From there, it moves into practical techniques for gaining visibility through asset inventories, cost allocation models, tagging strategies, and forecasting.

Once you have visibility, the next step is action. The book walks through real-world optimization strategies for compute, storage, and network resources—always with hands-on examples and a focus on practicality. If you're running Kubernetes, you'll also learn how to bring cost visibility to containerized workloads using tools like Kubecost or OpenCost, and how to avoid common pitfalls in shared clusters.