Solved: Give Opinion: What can FinOps Weekly do Better?

#devops #programming #tutorial #cloud

🚀 Executive Summary

TL;DR: FinOps content often overwhelms engineers with irrelevant financial metrics, lacking the crucial context needed for action. The solution involves transforming FinOps communication to provide actionable, role-specific cost insights by delivering contextualized data, such as linking cost changes to specific deployments or resource modifications.

🎯 Key Takeaways

Implement role-specific tagging (e.g., [Engineer], [Finance], [Leadership]) in FinOps communications to enable targeted consumption and reduce irrelevant noise for different audiences.
Develop personalized ops digests by correlating data from AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR), APM metrics (e.g., Datadog), and CI/CD pipeline logs to link cost deltas directly to specific resources and deployments.
Adopt an alerting-first approach for cost anomalies, treating them like performance incidents with real-time notifications (e.g., Slack, PagerDuty) that include comprehensive context like affected service, region, metric, threshold breach, and last commit.

Most FinOps content drowns engineers in irrelevant financial metrics. Learn how to filter the noise and get actionable, role-specific cost insights that actually help you do your job, not just fill your inbox.

Let’s Be Honest: Most FinOps Newsletters Are Just Noise for Engineers

I still remember the “Redshift Incident of Q3.” It was a Tuesday. I was neck-deep in a P1 outage with our main API, prod-user-auth-svc, throwing 500s. Right in the middle of the firefight, I get the “FinOps Weekly Digest.” The subject line, in bright, cheerful green, announced a “15% Cost Optimization Opportunity!” The email was full of graphs showing a cost spike in our prod-analytics-cluster. It told me the ‘what’—costs were up. But it gave me zero ‘why’ or ‘who’. Was it a bad query? A new deployment from the data science team? An auto-scaling config I wasn’t aware of? I had a production service on fire; I couldn’t spend an hour playing detective on a cost report. I archived the email and got back to the real problem. That’s the disconnect. For us in the trenches, a cost number without context is just noise.

The Real Problem: Context is King, and Most Reports are Paupers

This isn’t just a knock on a specific newsletter; it’s a systemic issue. A lot of FinOps content is written from the perspective of a CFO or a finance manager. They see dollars and percentages. We see services, deployments, and resource utilization. The root cause of this frustration, which I see echoed in community threads, is that the information isn’t translated for the people who can actually fix the underlying issue. A report that says “EBS volume costs are up 10%” is useless. A report that says “The prod-db-01 backup snapshot frequency was changed from daily to hourly by commit a1b2c3d and will increase costs by $500/month” is something I can actually use.

Three Ways We Can Cut Through the Noise

So, how do we fix it? Whether you’re consuming a public newsletter or building your own internal reports, the goal is the same: make it actionable for the intended audience. Here are a few approaches, from the simple to the radical.

1. The Quick Fix: Just Tag It, Already

This is the simplest thing any content provider can do. Stop sending one monolithic email to everyone. Use simple, clear tags in the subject line or at the very top of each section. Let me scan and delete with confidence.

[Engineer]: For technical deep dives, tutorials on cost-aware architecture, or alerts about specific service cost changes.
[Finance]: For budget forecasting, showback/chargeback models, and high-level trend analysis.
[Leadership]: For executive summaries, competitive analysis on cloud pricing, and strategic guidance.

If I see an email with the subject “FinOps Weekly: [Engineer] Anomaly Detected in us-east-1 Lambda Usage”, I’m opening it. If it says “[Finance] Q4 Budget Forecasting”, I know it’s not for me.

Pro Tip: Internally, we started doing this with our own automated reports. We simply prefix the subject line with the relevant team alias, like [sre-team] or [data-platform]. Engagement went up immediately because people knew it was relevant to their stack.

2. The Permanent Fix: The Personalized Ops Digest

The one-size-fits-all newsletter is a relic. The real goal is a personalized digest that pulls information relevant to my services. This is more work, but it’s where the real value is. We built a simple Python script that runs weekly to do this for our teams. It’s not fancy, but it works.

It ingests data from multiple sources:

AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR)
Datadog APM metrics
Our CI/CD pipeline deployment logs (via API)

Then, it correlates the data based on resource tags and generates a simple, per-team summary. Here’s a conceptual look at the logic:

# PSEUDO-CODE
def generate_team_digest(team_name):
  # Get all resources tagged with 'team: team_name'
  team_resources = aws_api.get_resources_by_tag('team', team_name)

  # For each resource, get cost delta from last week
  cost_deltas = cost_explorer.get_cost_deltas(team_resources)

  # Get recent deployments that touched these resources
  related_deployments = gitlab_api.get_deployments_for_resources(team_resources)

  # Format a simple report
  report = f"Digest for {team_name}:\n"
  for resource, delta in cost_deltas.items():
    if delta > COST_THRESHOLD:
      report += f"- ALERT: {resource} cost increased by {delta}%\n"
      report += f"  - Possible Cause: Deployment '{related_deployments[resource].commit_id}'\n"

  return report

This moves the conversation from “The cloud bill is high” to “Your last deployment to prod-inventory-api increased its Lambda invocation cost by 40%.” See the difference? It’s specific, contextual, and actionable.

3. The ‘Nuclear’ Option: The Anti-Newsletter, The Alerting-First Approach

Here’s the most “DevOps” take on this: kill the weekly email entirely. Cost is just another metric, like latency or error rate. A cost anomaly should be treated like a performance anomaly. It should be an alert, not a line item in a report I read three days later.

Instead of a newsletter, set up real-time alerting that pipes directly into the tools your engineers already live in, like Slack or PagerDuty. Set a budget or an anomaly detection threshold for a specific service, and when it’s breached, fire an alert with all the context attached.

Here’s what that looks like in our main SRE Slack channel:


🚨 FinOps Anomaly Alert [High] 🚨 Service: `prod-image-processor-lambda` Account: 123456789012 Region: `us-west-2` Metric: Estimated Charges Threshold: Exceeded 24hr forecast by 250% Last Commit: `8f7e6d5` by Darian Vance Link to Cost Explorer: https://console.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/…

Warning: Be careful with this one. If your thresholds are too sensitive, you’ll just create a new kind of noise and lead to massive alert fatigue. Start with your most critical or historically volatile services and tune from there.

It’s About Empowerment, Not Accounting

At the end of the day, the goal of FinOps content for engineers shouldn’t be to turn us into accountants. It should be to empower us to make better architectural and operational decisions. To do that, we need context, not just numbers. Whether it’s through simple tagging or a full-blown alerting integration, the key is to shift the focus from reporting what happened to explaining why it happened and who can fix it. That’s a digest I’d actually read.