Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In this episode of FinOps on Azure, Michael Stephenson sits down with Frank Contrepois, independent FinOps voice and co-host of The FinOps Guys podcast — to explore what it really means to manage cloud costs from a business-first perspective. Frank has been in the FinOps space for nearly a decade and brings a genuinely different angle to the conversation. His background in commodity trading at Strategic Blue (a Morgan Stanley spinoff) shaped how he thinks about reserved instances, commitment strategies, and why most teams approach cost management the wrong way round.

With hyperscalers, growth comes with a hidden cost. The more your data moves, the more you pay, by design. Egress fees are that cost. A model built to discourage migration, limit flexibility, and keep you trapped in their ecosystem. At Civo, we've eliminated that barrier completely. No egress fees, no hidden charges. Every cost is transparent and predictable, so you always know exactly what you're paying for. You stay because you choose to. That's cloud freedom.

April was a big month at Harness. AI is changing how code gets written — and the rest of the SDLC is catching up. In this update, Dewan Ahmed walks through Harness product releases across three themes: AI in the developer workflow, security and governance for AI assets, and self-service maturity for developers and platform teams. What's covered (with timestamps): Found this useful? Subscribe for monthly product updates, and drop a comment telling us which release you want a deep dive on next.

Want to start chaos engineering? Don't randomly break stuff and hope for the best. Real chaos engineering starts with defining your system's steady state metrics like latency, throughput, and error rates. Then you form a clear hypothesis about what should happen when failures occur. Next, you inject controlled failures, starting small with single pod kills or network drops, not production meltdowns. Finally, you limit the blast radius by running experiments in safe environments first.