Category: VMware & Cloud
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Reserved Instances, Savings Plans and Committed Use Discounts (Cloud FinOps Series, Part 12)
Commitment discounts cut the rate, not the waste. How reserved instances, savings plans and committed use discounts differ across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, and why over-committing costs you more than under-committing.
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Rightsizing Cloud Compute Without Breaking Production (Cloud FinOps Series, Part 11)
Rightsizing is the first cost lever most teams pull and the one most often aimed at the wrong workload. How the AWS, Azure and GCP recommendation engines actually decide, where they are blind, and how to act on them safely.
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Cloud Unit Economics: Cost per Customer, Transaction and Feature (Cloud FinOps Series, Part 10)
Total cloud spend tells a leadership team almost nothing. Here is how to build a unit metric that does, which costs belong in the numerator, and the denominator mistake that quietly makes a good engineering result look like nothing happened.
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Cloud Cost Anomaly Detection and Alerting That People Act On (Cloud FinOps Series, Part 9)
Every provider gives you anomaly detection free. Almost nobody acts on it. Here is how detection actually works on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, what thresholds to set, and why the metric that matters is time to notify the owner.
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Cloud Cost Forecasting and Budgeting That Survives Contact With Reality (Cloud FinOps Series, Part 8)
A forecast is a promise somebody has to keep, and a budget is the money that backs it. Here is how to build one that holds, how accurate it has to be, and why you should alert on forecast rather than actual.
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Cloud Cost Reporting That Drives Action (Cloud FinOps Series, Part 7)
Most cloud cost reports are read once and then ignored. Here is what a report has to contain, who it has to reach, and the four numbers that tell you whether anyone is actually acting on it.
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Showback vs Chargeback and Which One Your Organisation Can Actually Run (Cloud FinOps Series, Part 6)
Chargeback is not the graduation ceremony for showback. It is a different contract with your finance team, with prerequisites most cloud practices have not met. Here is how to tell which one you can run this year.
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Cloud Tagging and Cost Allocation That Actually Holds Up (Cloud FinOps Series, Part 5)
Tags are the primary key of your entire cost model, and they only work forward in time. Here is how to design a tag schema, enforce it at creation, and handle the spend that will never carry a tag.
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How to Read a Cloud Bill on AWS, Azure and GCP (Cloud FinOps Series, Part 4)
The invoice is a summary you cannot act on. The billing export is the real dataset, and it uses four different numbers all called cost. Here is how to read both on AWS, Azure and GCP.
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FinOps Framework Principles, Personas and Phases Explained (Cloud FinOps Series, Part 3)
The FinOps Framework is not a maturity checklist you work through once. It is a set of principles, personas, domains and a three phase loop you run continuously, and knowing which piece to reach for is most of the skill.
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Why Cloud Cost Behaves Differently From Every Other IT Budget (Cloud FinOps Series, Part 2)
Cloud cost is not a budget line, it is the output of thousands of small engineering decisions made by people who never see a bill. Here is the mental model that makes the rest of FinOps make sense.
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What FinOps Actually Is, and What It Is Not (Cloud FinOps Series, Part 1)
FinOps is not a cost cutting project and it is not a dashboard. Here is the actual definition, the three phases, the six principles, and the one thing to build first.
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About the Author
Dr Pranay Jha
Dr. Pranay Jha is a Cloud and AI Consultant with 18+ years of experience in hybrid cloud, virtualization, and enterprise infrastructure transformation. He specializes in VMware technologies, multi-cloud strategy, and Generative AI solutions. He holds a PhD in Computer Applications with research focused on Cloud and AI, has published multiple research papers, and has been a VMware vExpert since 2016 and a VMUG Community Leader.
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