Comparison
FinOpsvsUnit economics
FinOps
engineering, finance and product look at the same spend numbers weekly, and the engineer who can change it is in the room.
The practice of making cloud spend a shared, continuous engineering concern rather than a quarterly finance surprise. Its central claim is that only the people who provision resources can change the bill, so visibility, attribution and accountability have to reach them. Its characteristic failure is becoming a reporting function that produces dashboards nobody with the ability to act ever reads.
Full entry →Unit economics
the bill went up thirty percent and the cost per order fell, which is the only version of that sentence worth reporting.
Expressing infrastructure cost per unit of business value — per order, per tenant, per thousand requests — rather than in absolute currency. It is the only framing in which a growing bill can be evaluated, because absolute cost conflates growth with waste. It also gives engineering a target that survives a good quarter, which a spend cap does not.
Full entry →