Cloud Cost Governance and FinOps Operating Model

Introduced cloud cost visibility, accountability structures, and engineering-level cost controls for a SaaS business whose AWS spend had grown faster than its ability to understand or manage it.

AWSAWS Cost ExplorerCost and Usage ReportsAthenaS3KubecostAWS ConfigTrusted AdvisorTerraformtfsec

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Purpose

Cloud spend had grown faster than the client’s ability to explain it, allocate it, or act on it in engineering terms. The project solved that by creating a FinOps operating model that linked tagging, attribution, reporting, and optimization into a repeatable process instead of relying on occasional billing review and reactive cost cutting.

Technical Implementation

Established a cost allocation model by tagging all AWS resources with environment, team, product, and cost-centre labels enforced through AWS Config rules and tfsec checks in Terraform pull-request pipelines, then validated tag coverage and accuracy before building reporting on top.
Deployed AWS Cost Explorer views and custom Cost and Usage Report exports to an S3-backed Athena dataset so engineering leads could query spend by service, team, and environment without depending on finance-team exports or one-off billing reviews.
Used Kubecost on the EKS cluster to allocate Kubernetes namespace and workload costs back to owning teams, correlating pod-level resource consumption with underlying AWS node costs so per-service and per-team attribution was available alongside the broader cloud billing data.
Identified rightsizing opportunities through EC2 and RDS Compute Optimizer recommendations, surfaced idle resources using AWS Trusted Advisor and custom Cost Explorer filters, and built a recurring review process for teams to act on recommendations as part of their normal sprint workflow rather than a separate one-off exercise.

Client Delivery & Handover

The work was run with engineering leads, platform owners, and the finance team so cost allocation models, accountability ownership, and review cadences reflected the actual organizational structure. Controls were built in phases: tagging and visibility first, then attribution reporting, then rightsizing and optimization. Handover included tagging governance documentation, Athena query templates, Kubecost operating guidance, rightsizing review procedures, and training sessions for engineering leads on reading cost reports and acting on recommendations.

Outcome

The client moved from reactive billing surprises to a proactive cost model with team-level accountability, clearer spend attribution, and a repeatable process for identifying and acting on optimization opportunities.

Project Snapshot