Move Fast, Break Budgets: FinOps in the Age of DevOps and AI

Cloud-native, Kubernetes, serverless, managed databases, AI APIs, vector stores, GPUs – modern engineering teams have never had more power at their fingertips… or more ways to accidentally burn through a budget before lunch. High speed, low friction, and “just spin it up” are great for innovation, but brutal for cost transparency and control.

This 30‑minute session takes a brutally honest look at how DevOps and platform teams really work today: provisioning infrastructure in minutes, consuming dozens of services, experimenting with AI – and then being surprised by a cloud bill that looks like a phone number. The talk focuses on FinOps as a practical discipline, not a buzzword: how to build cost awareness into mindsets, platforms, and AI usage without slowing teams down.

We will walk through typical failure modes (zombie clusters, idle GPUs, over‑provisioned everything, “free” pilots that never die) and show simple patterns to fix them: good tagging, sensible guardrails, showback/chargeback that doesn’t start a civil war, and cost signals inside the tools engineers already use. The goal: help teams move fast, stay secure, use AI – and still sleep the night before the invoice closes.