Cloud spending is soaring, driven by data projects and the need for agility. But in the race for scalability, too many organizations are losing sight of what's essential: control. In the absence of control, costs soar without always creating value.
Optimizing doesn't mean cutting blindly. It means identifying the right technical levers to reduce the financial footprint, without holding back projects or innovation. Where to start?
FinOps, or how to drive value before costs
FinOps is neither a tool nor a platform. It is an ongoing governance practice, aimed at aligning cloud consumption with expected business value. This means breaking down the silos between IT, finance and business teams, to make real usage visible, arbitrate technical choices on the basis of return on investment, and build a shared culture of cost responsibility.
There are three main levers for action: intelligent resource sharing, data lifecycle management, and compute optimization.
Allocating resources intelligently: the real lever for efficiency
One of the first areas of optimization is to better align resources with actual usage. Because while the cloud facilitates deployment, it also facilitates... waste. Test environments left active at weekends, machines running outside their normal hours of use, workloads oversized as a precaution: without strict governance, additional costs quickly accumulate.
However, the cloud's native elasticity can become an asset, provided it is mastered. The use of managed services, microservices or serverless architectures enables pay-per-use and an infrastructure capable of absorbing peak loads without permanent oversizing. But this flexibility comes at a price: technical overhaul, skills upgrading, operational complexity... all factors to be factored into the equation. These constraints are particularly marked for existing applications, which often require re-invoicing, whereas new cloud-native applications can be designed from the outset to take advantage of these services. In some cases - such as for stable, predictable applications - long-term VM commitments are more appropriate.
The challenge is not to limit cloud usage, but to make the right allocation choices, at the right time. Here, fine-tuned engineering can optimize overall TCO without restricting projects.
Store less, but store better
Cloud storage management is often neglected, even though it can represent considerable costs for large-scale data projects. Optimizing doesn't mean arbitrarily deleting: it means intelligently prioritizing. By categorizing data according to frequency of access (hot, cold, archive), and defining appropriate expiration and archiving rules, you can avoid keeping costly volumes indefinitely.
Regular cleansing, coupled with an automated lifecycle, eliminates unnecessary costs without impacting data quality or usability. Here again, FinOps is not about saving money for the sake of saving money, but about allocating resources correctly.
Analyze, yes... but without breaking the bank
In modern analytics platforms, pricing varies according to the provider. BigQuery charges by volume scanned. Snowflake, on the other hand, charges by warehousing execution time. In both cases, good practice can make a huge difference.
On the Snowflake side, optimization involves intelligent sizing of warehouses according to queries, clever use of auto-suspend, and a good balance between scaling and queuing. Storage also requires adjusting clustering and time travel parameters, and taking advantage of caching.
Finally, for BigQuery, techniques such as partitioning by date or by usage can significantly reduce the volumes scanned, sometimes by as much as 70%. A well-thought-out architecture, even on the analytical side, has a direct impact on the invoice.
FinOps maturity also depends on governance
Cost management is not limited to technical arbitration. The real difference lies in governance. Setting up consumption dashboards, proactive budget alerts, showback or chargeback mechanisms for teams: all these help to create a framework of accountability and transparency.
Tags applied to resources make it possible to allocate costs on a fine scale - by team, project or environment - and build reliable forecast management. Only by combining data, finance and technology can we create a truly operational FinOps.
Adopting a FinOps approach means moving from reactive management to proactive cloud governance. This shared culture between IT, finance and the business not only makes it easier to manage costs, but above all creates a breeding ground for controlled innovation.
FinOps does not seek to divide expenditure, but to identify where to invest to create maximum value. It is this ability to transform every euro spent into a performance lever that distinguishes mature organizations.
Thomas Ballester
Senior Consultant Cloud4Data
Micropole, a Talan company
