Your AI Budget Has a Memory Problem
When companies first started paying serious attention to cloud costs, they found plenty of things that were easy to understand. A virtual machine was still running after a project ended. A storage volume had been detached and forgotten. An oversized instance had been selected two years earlier and never reconsidered. Finding these things didn’t necessarily […]
I’m Moving
My engineering writing has a new home. Going forward, new articles on systems and software engineering, requirements, traceability, MBSE, engineering AI, Automotive SPICE, and the realities of managing complex engineering lifecycles will be published at Engineering Universe on Substack. The existing articles here on Medium will remain available, but new work will be published on Engineering […]
The Cloud Bill Went Down. The Cost Went Up.
A lower cloud bill can still hide worsening economics. Here’s why FinOps teams need to measure the cost of useful business outcomes, not just infrastructure spend.
The Cloud Bill Went Down. The Cost Went Up.
We’ve all sat in that monthly cloud review. You know the one—where everyone walks in already knowing exactly how it wraps up. For a week straight, the FinOps crew has been grinding through invoices, hunting anomalies, and tweaking forecasts. Engineering threw in their notes on idle tech and rightsizing, while Finance checked off the budget […]
Your Engineering Process Is Only as Good as the Evidence It Leaves Behind
An assessment can’t give you credit for what it can’t see. Picture a fairly ordinary moment in an Automotive SPICE assessment. An assessor is looking at a software requirement and asks a question that does not sound particularly dangerous. “Can you show me where this requirement came from?” Nobody in the room is particularly worried. The systems […]
The Model Was Cheap. Everything Around It Wasn’t.
The AI team came to the cost review with good news. The pilot was faster than the process it replaced, users liked it, and the model invoice was lower than expected. Then finance asked why the rest of the cloud bill had grown by several times that amount. The dashboards came out. The model team showed […]
FinOps Was Built for the Cloud. AI Has Other Plans.
For more than a decade, enterprise IT had a remarkably consistent answer to almost every infrastructure question. Move it to the cloud. The advice was not simplistic; it was usually correct. Renting compute instead of owning it reduced capital investment, shortened procurement cycles, accelerated software delivery, and gave organizations a level of flexibility that private infrastructure […]
The Dashboard Was Beautiful. Nothing Changed.
Why organizations that see everything still struggle to act. “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” It may be the most successful sentence ever written about enterprise technology. For decades it has shaped how organizations invest in software, infrastructure, operations, and management. It justified the first network monitoring consoles, the explosion of business intelligence platforms, the […]
The Most Expensive Cloud Decision Happens Before Anyone Opens AWS
Every architecture diagram is also a financial forecast. We just rarely draw it that way. There is a moment in almost every engineering project that disappears almost as soon as it happens. Nobody schedules a meeting to celebrate it. Nobody writes it into the project plan. Six months later, almost nobody remembers it at all. It usually […]
DevSecFinOps in Practice: How Cloudability Governance Will Change GitLab-Centric DevOps
Engineering organizations modernizing around GitLab often focus on: CI/CD automation DevSecOps integration Pipeline-based validation Compliance traceability But there is one dimension that frequently remains outside the pipeline: Cost governance. IBM Cloudability Governance changes that dynamic — and for GitLab-centric environments, it opens up a new layer of DevSecFinOps integration. What’s Available Today — and What’s Coming Next Cloudability Governance is now […]