Azure FinOps Essentials

Hi there, and welcome to this week’s edition of Azure FinOps Essentials! 👋

This week, I’m diving into a question I hear often: what’s the difference between DevOps and FinOps—and do they even belong together?

We already expect developers to think about security. But what about cost? In this edition, I’ll unpack how these two disciplines actually complement each other, and why bringing them closer together—what I like to call DevFinOps—makes a lot of sense.

We’ll explore where the practices overlap, how they can support each other, and how to start embedding cost awareness into development workflows—without slowing things down.

Let’s connect the dots between speed, ownership, and cloud value.

Cheers, Michiel

Wait… Another “Ops”?

Just when you got DevOps running smoothly—along comes FinOps.

Yet another discipline. Another acronym. Another framework.

You might ask:

• Are these two things competing?

• Is FinOps just finance telling engineers to spend less?

• Or is this just DevOps with a budget report tacked on?

It’s a common reaction. And it makes sense.

At a glance, DevOps and FinOps seem to live in different worlds. One focuses on velocity and uptime, while the other focuses on cost awareness and financial accountability.

But here’s the thing: both are born out of the same pain—cloud complexity.

Cloud gives you flexibility, speed, and scale. But it also introduces new challenges: spiraling costs, opaque pricing, infrastructure sprawl, and hard-to-answer questions like “what are we actually paying for?”

That’s where FinOps steps in.

Let’s look at the formal definition, straight from the FinOps Foundation:

Key ideas here:

• It’s a cultural practice, not a tool or dashboard.

• It’s about collaboration, not control.

• It’s focused on value, not just cost reduction.

• It empowers teams with data and context—so they can make smart decisions early.

In other words, FinOps isn’t about locking down infrastructure or auditing cloud bills after the fact. It’s about shifting cost awareness left—into the development cycle—and helping engineers see the impact of their choices before they hit production.

Sound familiar?

Let’s now look at how DevOps fits in.

According to AWS:

Like FinOps, it’s cultural.

It’s about autonomy, collaboration, and measuring outcomes. It values fast feedback loops, automation, and clear ownership. The famous DevOps mantra—you build it, you run it—is about pushing decisions and responsibility closer to the people who actually write the code.

And much like FinOps, it’s not just a new title or a new team—it’s a new way of thinking.

So no, FinOps isn’t replacing DevOps. And DevOps isn’t complete without cost in the picture.

They’re not rivals. They’re more like siblings.

Why FinOps and DevOps Actually Belong Together

Once you move past the buzzwords, you start to see the overlap between DevOps and FinOps. They may look like different practices—but under the surface, they share the same DNA.

1. They both focus on delivering business value

DevOps aims to ship software faster and safer. FinOps focuses on doing that in a financially responsible way. The end goal is the same: delivering value to the business.

DevOps asks: Can we move quickly and deliver reliably?

FinOps adds: Are we making smart, sustainable choices while doing it?

Speed without awareness can lead to inefficiency. Control without agility becomes friction. Both are needed to create impact.

2. They both thrive on fast feedback loops

DevOps emphasizes fast cycles: write code, test, deploy, learn, improve. FinOps pushes to make cloud cost feedback part of that loop.

Instead of learning about budget overruns weeks later in a spreadsheet, engineers can see cost implications directly in their workflow—whether that’s a cost diff in a pull request or an alert during a build pipeline.

Bringing cost awareness into the development lifecycle helps teams make better decisions earlier.

3. They both depend on strong collaboration

DevOps broke the silos between development and operations. FinOps goes a step further—connecting engineers with finance, procurement, and business leadership.

In this model, engineers might review cost changes the same way they review performance or security impacts. Finance teams, in turn, become better informed about technical decisions.

That said, collaboration doesn’t mean everyone owns everything.

There is still a place for dedicated FinOps teams, just like many organizations have platform teams within a DevOps culture. These teams support others by creating tooling, enforcing policies, and building shared services.

FinOps teams can:

• Drive rate optimization efforts (e.g., commitment management)

• Set tagging and budgeting standards

• Educate teams about cloud cost patterns

• Maintain dashboards and reporting pipelines

Platform teams do the same for infrastructure and developer experience. They don’t remove responsibility from other teams—they enable it.

4. They both rely on automation

DevOps automates deployment, testing, infrastructure, and more. FinOps rides along that automation layer, integrating cost checks, tagging validations, and policy enforcement directly into those same pipelines.

Manual processes won’t scale when you have dozens of teams and services. Automation is what brings cost governance to scale without slowing teams down.

5. They both require a mindset shift

You don’t “implement” DevOps or FinOps. They aren’t projects. They are cultures that grow inside your organization.

They require a shared sense of ownership, leadership support, education, and above all—patience.

Both succeed only when people are empowered to make decisions and are equipped with the right information and tools to do so.

Getting Started with DevFinOps

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the “Ops” disciplines—DevOps, FinOps, SecOps. But the pattern is clear: these are not siloed functions. They’re shared responsibilities that need to be embedded into how teams work day-to-day.

Just as security has evolved into SecOps—a cross-cutting concern that touches every part of software delivery—cost awareness should be no different. Enter DevFinOps: an emerging mindset where engineering and finance collaborate early and often to make cost-informed decisions.

So where do you begin?

1. Start with awareness

Most engineers don’t ignore cost because they don’t care—it’s because they’ve never been shown how cloud costs work.

Talk about costs in sprint reviews. Include cost impact in architecture discussions. Bring cloud economics into onboarding for new engineers. Make cost visible, and people will naturally start making better decisions.

2. Educate teams

Make sure engineers understand the basics:

• What are SKUs, regions, and tiers in Azure?

• How do services like storage or networking actually incur cost?

• What’s the difference between actual and amortized cost?

You don’t need finance training to make better cloud decisions—just context.

A great entry point: walk through a real bill together. See what’s driving cost and what you can optimize.

3. Provide insights

Dashboards help, but only if they’re tailored and accessible. A weekly report in someone’s inbox rarely moves the needle.

Instead:

• Surface cost diffs in pull requests.

• Show trending usage by resource group.

• Build alerts for anomalies, like sudden spikes in daily cost.

The goal: cost insights that are timely, scoped, and actionable.

4. Embed tools and automation

Use tools that make FinOps part of the developer experience:

• Infra-as-code cost scanners like Infracost

• Tag validation in CI pipelines

• ARM/Bicep/Terraform best practices for cost efficiency

• Budget thresholds in Azure with automated alerts

It’s not about stopping work—it’s about supporting developers with the right signals at the right time.

5. Build a culture

DevFinOps isn’t just a checklist. Like DevOps and SecOps, it needs leadership support and cultural reinforcement.

Celebrate wins like:

• Avoiding an expensive misconfiguration before deployment

• Consolidating environments to reduce waste

• Improving tagging coverage

Encourage teams to share what they’ve learned—what cost them money, and what saved them money.

DevOps, FinOps, and SecOps are not competing ideologies. They are perspectives that, when brought together, enable resilient, scalable, and sustainable cloud-native organizations.

DevFinOps is about putting cost right where it belongs: in the heart of the development process, without slowing teams down.

Want help starting? Ask yourself:

• Where does cost show up in your development lifecycle?

• Who is accountable?

• And what would change if developers had real-time cost visibility?

It’s time to build bridges, not barriers.

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