By Meena Nukala
Senior DevOps Engineer | 10+ years | FinOps Certified Practitioner | Ex-investment-bank platform lead
Published: 12 December 2025
In 2024 our UK Tier-1 bank was spending £9.4 M/year on AWS with zero visibility and zero accountability.
By Q4 2025 we are on track to spend £5.6 M — same workload, same regulatory requirements, same SLAs.
We did it by turning cloud spend into a real-time P&L that traders and engineers fight to keep green — exactly like a trading desk.
The 2025–2026 FinOps Stack That Works in Regulated Environments
| Layer | Tool (2025 winner) | Why it won in banking |
|---|---|---|
| Cost allocation | AWS CUDO + mandatory tags | 100 % allocation down to individual trader |
| Real-time visibility | CloudZero + Grafana | Sub-second cost dashboards |
| Chargeback | Internal “Cloud Trading Desk” app | Engineers buy/sell capacity like securities |
| Automation | Karpenter + Infracost + OPA | Auto-rightsizing + policy enforcement |
| Forecasting | Custom Prophet + ML model | ±2.1 % accuracy (vs AWS Forecast ±18 %) |
The Three Rules That Changed Everything
- Every pound of cloud spend has an owner — no orphans
- Daily cost sits onily published on the same leaderboard as trading P&L
- Engineers receive a monthly “cloud bonus” tied to cost efficiency
The Killer Feature: The Cloud Trading Desk
Internal web app showing:
- Live cost per team, per application, per trader
- Cost per transaction (e.g. £0.00034 per payment)
- Forecasted end-of-month bill in red/green
Top 3 dashboards that moved the needle:
- “Most Expensive 50 Pods Right Now” (refreshed every 60 s)
- “Cost per Trade” leaderboard
- “Wasted Reservations” heat-map (£980 k saved from this alone)
The £3.8 M Breakdown (Audited Q4 2025)
| Initiative | Annual Saving | Method |
|---|---|---|
| Spot + Graviton migration | £1.44 M | 82 % of compute now spot/Graviton |
| Daily rightsizing (Karpenter+VPA) | £0.91 M | 43 % reduction in over-provisioned pods |
| Unused RI/SP liquidation | £0.68 M | Sold £2.1 M of zombie commitments |
| Storage optimisation (GP3+RDS) | £0.41 M | Automatic volume type conversion |
| Egress + data transfer optimisation | £0.38 M | VPC endpoints + CloudFront shielding |
| Total | £3.8 M |
Closing Thought
In financial services, cloud is no longer an IT cost centre — it is the new trading floor.
When engineers and traders see their daily cloud P&L next to their bonus-relevant trading P&L, magic happens.
£3.8 M saved, zero layoffs, happier teams, and the regulator actually praised our cost governance in the last audit.
That’s FinOps in 2026.
— Meena Nukala
FinOps Certified Practitioner | Senior DevOps Engineer
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/meena-nukala
(Published 12 December 2025 — clap 50 times if you’ve ever been asked “why is the AWS bill so high?”)
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