Time and time again we hear the same statements from FinOps teams with respect to what is holding back optimization of wasteful cloud resource consumption. Engineers and App Owners are interested in helping but stop short at actually taking actions to reduce that waste. There are many reasons for this main sticking point when it comes to application owners and developers taking action.

If you’re sick with a cold then measuring your body temperature is a wise move or maybe if things are really bad a visit to a doctor might result in testing vs. what are considered “normal” levels in order to diagnose the issue; seasonal flu or infection? To improve our health after picking up a bad bug, we do things that affect our situation back to normal levels once again where we can then declare ourselves healthy.

We’ve seen two general approaches to getting optimization done to reduce cloud costs in our customers; the first and most popular is “the stick” where FinOps teams campaign against lines of business development teams with a mantra of “spend less”!

Cloud Tagging should be automated, not left to humans. Optimization in the cloud is actually really simple. Here’s how we get our customers thinking differently which in turn makes them successful. “To your developers the cloud is like a candy store is to a kid where all the candy is free”. Just as parents need to teach their kids the value of money, you need to teach your developers the value of cloud spend.