#finops
8 posts tagged finops.
- The Kubernetes upgrade treadmill has a price tag nowEKS extended support costs six times the standard control plane price. Falling behind on Kubernetes versions used to be technical debt. Now it is a line item.
- Savings Plans are bonds, not couponsA commitment is a fixed-income position on your own future usage. Finance teams have managed that kind of risk for a century. Borrow their playbook: ladder it.
- EMR clusters should die youngA long-running EMR cluster is a pet with a very large food bill. Treat clusters as disposable compute for a single job, and S3 as the only place data lives.
- The GPU line item is the new EC2 line itemAI workloads moved the biggest number on the bill. The playbook that tamed EC2 still applies, with two new metrics: GPU utilization and cost per request.
- On AWS, the SQL Server bill is a license billSQL Server 2016 reached end of extended support in July 2026, so a lot of databases are moving now. Before resizing anything, know that cores, not hardware, drive the cost.
- Kubernetes requests are a purchase orderEvery CPU and memory request reserves capacity you pay for, whether the pod uses it or not. Get them right and the cluster gets smaller and more stable.
- Your observability bill is a cardinality billMonitoring costs rarely grow with traffic. They grow with labels, log lines nobody reads and traces kept by default. Here is where the money goes and how to get it back.
- The cheapest EC2 instance is the one you turned offEvery cost review I've run starts the same way. Someone opens Cost Explorer, sorts by service, and EC2 sits at the top like it pays rent. It doesn't. You do.