What the FaaS? FinOps as a Service explained

The cloud cost reality check

At first, cloud adoption feels like progress. Infrastructure scales, teams move faster, features ship sooner. It’s all green lights and high fives, until the bill shows up. That’s when the conversation shifts. It’s no longer just about how much it cost, but why, and what the company actually got in return.

What starts as an engineering story quickly becomes a business problem. And not a niche one, cloud spend is the third-largest line item for many companies, and sometimes even the first.

This is where FinOps enters the picture, bringing some structure to the chaos. And more recently, FinOps as a Service (Faas), offering companies a way to manage cloud costs with the same level of discipline they bring to any other major expense.

What is FinOps as a Service?

Let’s start with FinOps. The goal is simple enough: make cloud spending something people can actually understand and do something about. It creates the connection between finance, engineering, and product, so decisions happen with shared context instead of finger-pointing.

When developers choose instance types, they should understand what that means for the budget. When product managers scope new features, infrastructure costs shouldn’t arrive later as a budget shock, they should be a visible input from day one.

FinOps as a Service exists to make that possible without expecting your teams to become full-time economists. It gives them the information they need to make smarter decisions, without slowing them down in the process.

‍

Cloud Finops best practices

You don’t need a sacred playbook. You need working practices that actually change how teams operate. That’s the real difference between mature FinOps and the kind that lives in a slide deck no one opens twice.

‍

Start with visibility, not optimization

Everyone wants to save money, but most start in the dark. Tagging is today’s best practice, which says a lot, it’s inconsistent, easy to game, and usually incomplete. At Pelanor, we recognize that tagging alone doesn’t cut it. That’s why we focus on tools that give teams and stakeholders deeper, more granular visibility, down to the unit economics.

Still, it all rests on one basic truth: if you don’t know who’s spending the money, you’re not managing anything. You’re just waiting for the invoice and hoping for the best.

‍

Make costs a shared responsibility

The cloud is a team sport now. Engineering owns the architecture, which means they own the price tag too. Finance can’t just show up asking for cuts, they need to understand where spend drives actual value. Product can’t plan in a vacuum either. Real accountability comes from shared context, not from top-down pressure or magical thinking.

Automate the obvious wins

When a FinOps platform promises “30% savings in just one week,” they’re probably right. You probably will save that much, that fast. Turn off dev environments at night, resize the two-times-too-large instances, delete the zombie volumes. At that point, you’ve essentially cleaned your room.

These are the easy wins, and any competent platform should handle them without supervision. If you're still doing this manually, your cloud bill isn’t the problem, your tooling is. But once that’s done, once the low-hanging fruit is gone or has fallen into your lap, what’s left is the real work. The architectural trade-offs, the strategic decisions, and the long-term questions where cost and design collide. That’s where FinOps becomes less about optimization and more about actual operations.

‍

Establish a rhythm of accountability

Monthly reports are great if you like drama. A spike you could’ve caught two weeks ago is now a line item with a comma in it.

Weekly reviews don’t need to be long, dramatic, or even formal. They just need to happen. Look at the numbers. Ask obvious questions. Catch the weird stuff before it becomes a case study in someone’s postmortem. This isn’t about process for its own sake. It’s about making sure your infrastructure doesn’t outpace your attention.

‍

Use commitment-based discounts strategically

Sure, Reserved Instances and Savings Plans can save you a fortune. That’s the sales pitch. The fine print is that they can also lock you into commitments you regret six months later.

It’s easy to get hypnotized by discounts, but discounts aren't a strategy. So run the models, question the assumptions, and leave room for change. Efficiency is great. Inflexibility, less so.

‍

Measure what matters

Not all cloud spend is created equal. A thousand dollars powering your core product is money well spent. A thousand dollars keeping abandoned dev environments warm is a lot harder to defend.

This is where unit economics comes in: cost per customer, cost per transaction and cost per API call. Not because it looks good on a dashboard, but because it tells you what’s worth improving. Once you see how spend connects to value, the hard decisions don’t feel hard anymore. They just make sense.

Why building FinOps in-house often fails

There is a kind of elegant simplicity to the idea that you could, if you really wanted to, manage your own cloud costs. You have engineers, you have spreadsheets, you have opinions, why not just put the pieces together and do the thing? After all, it’s just software billing, and how hard can that really be?

Well. Give it 18 months and several reorganizations and you might have an answer, though probably not the one you were hoping for.

The first hurdle is human. FinOps talent exists, technically, but in much the same way that Higgs bosons exist, undetectable under normal conditions and wildly expensive to isolate. The skill set sits awkwardly at the intersection of finance, engineering, and organizational politics, which means the people who are truly good at it tend to either get promoted out of the job or leave to consult. That leaves you recruiting unicorns to clean up your AWS bill.

Next comes the tooling, which is its own flavor of existential dilemma.You could try to build something, and depending on your level of optimism, you might even believe it will only take a few quarters and some clever internal hackathons. Or you could buy a solution, which won’t solve your problems but will give you a login screen and a dashboard. ‍

Either path leads you to the same place: pouring time and budget into building a basic understanding of how money flows through your infrastructure, before you ever touch optimization.

And that’s before the real fun begins.

Cloud cost management is not a technical problem. It is a cultural one.Engineers need to be persuaded that infrastructure choices are not just architectural, but financial. Finance teams need to develop a working vocabulary in services they’ve never seen and don’t fully trust. And somewhere between those two ends of the org chart, product needs to ship on time. So you get standing meetings. You get cost review spreadsheets. You get “alignment,” which is a nice way of saying that everyone gets equally frustrated but no one quite agrees on what to do about it.

The hidden complexity of cloud costs

The cloud itself continues its transformation from “giant remote computer” to “Kafkaesque pricing labyrinth.” What used to be a few EC2 instances and an S3 bucket now looks more like a tax code. You are charged for storage, except when you are charged for how often you touch that storage, or how you move it, or whether it’s in a bucket that lives in the wrong region.

Network traffic gets priced like fine wine - vintage, origin, and volume all matter, though no one will explain exactly how. And then you discover the joys of egress fees, which have the charming habit of showing up precisely when your CFO is preparing quarterly guidance.

Add a second cloud provider and the situation evolves from confusing to baroque. Now you're reconciling billing formats that look like they were designed by rival medieval guilds. Discounts become quests. Forecasting turns into interpretive dance. And support calls begin to feel like therapy sessions where no one gets better.

And we haven’t even touched architecture. Containers are wonderful until you try to attribute cost. Serverless is magical until someone asks who is paying for it. Abstraction is the whole point, until someone from finance wants a line item they can copy into Excel. In the old world, you could point to a server and say, “this costs X.” In the new world, cost is smeared across microservices and ephemeral workloads like peanut butter across toast, uneven, unpredictable, and deeply unsatisfying.

This is the point where many companies start looking at FinOps-as-a-Service and thinking, “actually, yes, please, just make the invoices stop hurting.” Because someone does have to make sense of all this, eventually.

What you get with FinOps as a Service

A solid FinOps-as-a-Service provider will not hand you a dashboard and walk away. That is the easy part. The real value starts when someone sits down with those same charts and says, “Here is what this means, and here is what you can actually do about it.” Because without that step, all you really have is colorful analytics and a slowly rising sense of anxiety.

Real-time visibility with context

Seeing numbers is not the same as understanding them. A dashboard full of line graphs and spending spikes looks impressive, but it is just information. And information, especially in cloud billing, has a habit of being impressive and useless at the same time.

Knowing that you spent $50,000 on compute last month is technically helpful, in the way that knowing your rent is due is helpful. It is a fact. But it is not an answer. The real question is: what is hiding inside that number? If $15,000 of it came from a staging environment that no one has touched in a month, and $5,000was left on a fleet of instances no one bothered to resize after a scaling change, then you are not looking at spend. You are looking at opportunity.

And if the other $30,000 is tied to your actual product, the part that customers use and pay for, now you have something resembling a map. The goal is not more data. The goal is better judgment. That is what context gives you - the ability to stop guessing and start making choices that stick.

Predictive forecasting

Forecasting, done badly, is hope in spreadsheet form. Most companies look at what they spent last quarter, apply a growth factor, maybe flatten a seasonal spike, and then cross their fingers. Occasionally someone builds a macro.

The better approach is statistical. It starts with real usage data, folds in actual patterns, and uses models that can adjust dynamically as the business changes. You do not need to believe in machine learning to appreciate the outcome, and the benefit is simple: no one is surprised when the quarter ends.

The value is not in perfect accuracy. It is in having a number that is defensible, explainable, and just grounded enough that no one in finance has to invent a narrative to cover for a miss, which is progress.

Cultural transformation

This is the part no one budgets for and ends up mattering most. ‍

When cost signals are embedded in their workflow, not abstracted away, engineers naturally start optimizing. Not because they were asked to, but because they now see the tradeoffs in real time.

it in. Not because they were told to, but because they understand it now. Suddenly they are resizing instances, deleting things they do not need, and asking questions about architecture that start with cost instead of ending with it.

Finance teams, when given a real look into infrastructure, stop treating cloud as a mysterious black hole and start engaging with it as a system they can influence. When product, engineering, and finance are all working off the same data, using the same language, something very strange happens: they start agreeing. You do not need to call this transformation. You can just call it useful.

The state of cloud economics

Cloud spending is having a moment. Every industry survey lands somewhere in the same neighborhood: companies are wasting around 30% of their cloud budget. That is pure, untouched waste.

Meanwhile, cloud has quietly become the biggest item on the tech budget. For many companies, AWS costs are now larger than salaries or software. And yet, the way those costs are managed would be familiar to someone working in 2012.

The market context has moved on. The era of spending to grow and worrying later is over. Investors have questions now. Boards expect efficiency to be a feature, not a footnote. This is not about penny-pinching, it is about the credibility of your model.

Moving FinOps to an external service does not solve all of this. But it solves enough of it that the conversation can start to change. Less noise, faster decisions, and fewer meetings where no one can explain what just happened to the invoice.

Making the transition to FinOps as a Service

You’re probably wondering if moving to FinOps as a Service means signing up for a months-long migration nightmare. Good news: it doesn’t.

The best providers know how to plug into your existing cloud setup without causing a fuss. They start with read-only access so you don’t have to lie awake at night. Then they pull your data in and start showing you useful insights within days, not quarters.

The pricing model is straightforward too. No huge upfront investments in tools you might never use, no risky bets on hiring internal specialists who might jump ship six months later. Instead, predictable operational costs that scale with how much you actually need.

Most clients see savings cover the cost of the service within the first quarter. After that, everything else - clearer visibility, smarter decisions, less stress, is just extra.

Pelanor: your partner in practical FinOps

At Pelanor, we help organizations cut through the noise and focus on what actually matters: using the cloud without letting the costs get out of hand.

We’ve been there. That moment when the monthly cloud bill arrives and your stomach drops. We’ve seen the spreadsheets that try, and fail, to explain what’s going on. We’ve sat through meetings where nobody can answer why last quarter’s costs spiked. And we’ve figured out how to fix it.

Whether you’re just starting out with FinOps or trying to get more from an existing program, our team plugs in, gets to work, and delivers results quickly. Because FinOps isn’t about spending less. It’s about spending smarter.

‍