Introduction

Unexpected cloud costs are one of the biggest threats to companies operating at scale. A single misconfigured service or accidentally deployed resource can result in charges ranging from $10,000 to $150,000 in just hours or days.

This is especially common in large engineering organizations, where deployments are frequent, multiple teams manage environments, automation creates resources dynamically, and limits and guardrails aren't consistently applied.

The FinOps Foundation stresses the importance of continuous cost visibility to prevent financial surprises.