My Skill Lab
Cloud & DevOpsIntermediate

Cloud Cost Optimization and FinOps

Tagging, rightsizing, reserved capacity and cost accountability.

Taught by Prakash Shrestha · Cloud Solutions Architect

What you'll learn

  • Query AWS, Azure and Google Cloud billing data, including FOCUS exports, to explain what drives your spend
  • Design a tagging standard and enforce it with Terraform default tags and organisation policies
  • Find and remove idle resources, and rightsize oversized compute using Compute Optimizer and real utilisation data
  • Size Savings Plans, reservations and committed use discounts against your baseline and track coverage and utilisation
  • Cut storage and data transfer costs with lifecycle rules, storage tiers and better network paths
  • Build unit cost metrics, budgets and anomaly alerts, and run a weekly cost review with engineering and finance

About this course

Cloud bills grow quietly until someone in finance asks why. This intermediate course teaches cloud cost optimisation and FinOps to engineers, DevOps and platform teams, cloud architects and the finance or product people who work with them. You will learn to read billing data from AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, including the Cost and Usage Report and the FOCUS open billing format, and query it with SQL and the AWS CLI. You will design and enforce a tagging strategy for cost allocation, find idle and oversized resources, rightsize safely, and choose between Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, committed use discounts and Spot capacity. You will cut storage and data transfer costs with lifecycle rules and storage tiers, then build unit economics, budgets and anomaly alerts that give every team real cost accountability. Prerequisites: working familiarity with at least one major cloud provider and basic command-line confidence. No finance background is needed.

Course content

7 lessons
  1. 1Why FinOps Exists and How It WorksHow variable cloud spend created FinOps, and the framework, principles and people behind it.Preview
  2. 2Reading the Cloud Bill: Billing Data and FOCUSWhere detailed billing data lives on each cloud, what the cost columns mean, and how to query them.
  3. 3Tagging and Cost Allocation That Actually WorksDesigning a tag standard, enforcing it as code, and turning allocated spend into showback or chargeback.
  4. 4Rightsizing and Eliminating WasteFinding idle resources, oversized instances and forgotten storage, and fixing them without breaking production.
  5. 5Commitment Discounts and Spot CapacitySavings Plans, reservations, committed use discounts and Spot, and how to size commitments without overbuying.
  6. 6Storage Tiers, Lifecycle Rules and Data TransferMatching data to the right storage class, automating tiering, and finding the hidden costs of moving data.
  7. 7Unit Economics, Budgets and a Lasting FinOps PracticeMeasuring cost per unit of value, catching anomalies early, and building routines that keep costs accountable.