FinOps in Action

·E80

The Cloud Bill Nobody Was Watching ft. Michael Graff | Ep #80

August 6
41 mins

Episode Description

This week's episode of FinOps in Action takes a different shape, with PointFive Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer Gal Ben-David stepping in to host a conversation with Mike Graff, Infrastructure Architecture Director at Dolby Laboratories and a FinOps Ambassador. Mike shares a couple of real cost inefficiencies he's tracked down in the wild, then the conversation opens up into bigger questions about where FinOps is headed from new roles emerging on the engineering side to how AI might change the way teams find and fix waste. It's a grounded, practitioner led episode for anyone trying to close the gap between what engineering builds and what finance sees on the bill.

 

Here’s what we talked about:

  • Small misconfigurations can hide big costs. A couple of the "craziest" inefficiencies Mike's found weren't exotic, they were simple settings almost anyone could miss, and easy to fix once spotted.
  • Platform tools don't always keep pace with the cloud. Vendors can lag behind what cloud providers already support, and Mike argues teams shouldn't just accept those gaps.
  • Cost optimization and security fight the same uphill battle. Both compete for engineering attention against feature deadlines and both benefit from getting into the conversation earlier.
  • The FinOps role may be split in two. Mike and Gal dig into whether cost efficiency is becoming its own engineering discipline, separate from the finance side of FinOps.
  • You don't need a title to start. Many practitioners begin as a side project, start small, find one win, and let momentum build.

Chapters:

00:00 Vendor Security Rant

00:15 Special Episode Setup

01:25 Meet Mike Graff

02:18 Databricks Egress Surprise

05:14 Finding It in Dashboards

06:06 NAT Gateway Routing Trap

08:11 Tooling Gaps and Visibility

10:21 PaaS Transparency and Governance

13:56 Shifting Left With Engineers

22:10 Performance vs Cost Wins

23:30 Gamifying FinOps Scores

24:23 Unit Economics Challenges

25:21 AI for FinOps Tools

26:50 FinOps Agent Vision

27:50 Platform Engineering Link

31:24 Cloud Efficiency Engineer Role

36:25 Getting Started in FinOps

40:16 Community Wrap and Takeaways

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Quote of the Show:
"It all starts somewhere. It starts with poking into that data transfer dashboard and figuring out what's going on. Just get those wins, chipping away at the low hanging fruit.” - Michael Graff

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