Our FinOps practice delivers an average 37% cost reduction — through reserved instance optimization, right-sizing, and cost anomaly detection.
Engineered for growing organisations.
Cloud billing is opaque by design — providers profit from complexity, and most engineering organizations lack the commercial awareness to distinguish genuine cost optimization from noise. CloudForge's FinOps practice has audited cloud environments across AWS, Azure, and GCP and consistently identifies significant savings. The pattern is remarkably consistent: organizations overspend by 30–45% due to orphaned resources, oversized instances, missing reserved capacity, and a complete absence of cost attribution at the team or service level. The cloud bill becomes a finance problem nobody in engineering owns.
We don't just find costs to cut — we build cost awareness into engineering culture. A one-time audit saves money for a quarter; a FinOps operating model sustains savings indefinitely. Our engagements establish team-level cost attribution dashboards, anomaly detection that catches billing surprises within hours, reserved capacity planning that balances commitment risk against discount depth, and monthly optimization review cadences that treat cloud spend as an engineering metric alongside latency and uptime. Finance and engineering teams align around shared data rather than arguing over spreadsheets.
The difference between a cost-cutting exercise and a FinOps practice is sustainability. CloudForge builds the instrumentation, governance, and organizational habits that prevent cost regression. We configure budget threshold alerts, deploy automated rightsizing recommendations, implement tagging enforcement policies, and train engineering managers to interpret cost dashboards as part of their operational responsibility. Our clients don't need us to audit again next year — because the operating model we leave behind catches optimization opportunities continuously.
Common scenarios where this service delivers the highest impact.
Cloud bill spiked 40% month-over-month with no corresponding increase in customer traffic, feature releases, or infrastructure provisioning — finance is demanding answers engineering cannot provide.
Root cause identified within 5 business days, immediate remediation of orphaned resources and oversized instances, and anomaly detection configured to prevent recurrence.
Organization spending $2M+/month on cloud with no team-level cost attribution, no optimization cadence, and engineering leaders who have never seen their team's cloud spend.
Sustainable FinOps practice with team-level showback dashboards, monthly optimization reviews, budget alerting, and engineering managers accountable for their cost footprint.
Organization running entirely on on-demand pricing across AWS, Azure, and GCP — leaving 30–50% in committed-use discounts on the table due to fear of overcommitment.
Reserved instance and savings plan portfolio optimized across providers, balancing commitment risk against discount depth with quarterly rebalancing recommendations.
Shared Kubernetes clusters serving 15+ teams with no per-namespace cost visibility — platform team cannot justify cluster costs and application teams have no incentive to optimize.
Kubecost-based per-namespace and per-pod cost attribution with team-level showback reports, idle resource detection, and right-sizing recommendations for resource requests and limits.
Orphaned resources accumulating across 12 AWS accounts — forgotten dev environments, detached EBS volumes, unused Elastic IPs, and zombie NAT gateways costing $180K/year.
Complete orphaned resource inventory with automated cleanup scripts, account hygiene policies preventing recurrence, and tagging enforcement ensuring every resource has an owner and expiry.
A proven methodology built for growing organisations.
Ingest billing data across all accounts and map spend to teams and services
Right-size, delete orphans, and apply reserved capacity within the first 2 weeks
Deploy automated alerting for spend spikes and budget threshold breaches
Establish cost ownership, showback reports, and optimisation review cadences
A cloud-native SaaS platform with costs growing 15% month-over-month despite flat customer growth. Engineering teams had no visibility into their cost footprint, 142 orphaned resources were accumulating across 8 AWS accounts, and the CFO was demanding answers that nobody in engineering could provide.
CloudForge conducted a comprehensive FinOps audit: mapped all spend to teams and services, identified orphaned resources and oversized instances, optimized reserved capacity portfolio, deployed Kubecost for per-namespace attribution, and established a monthly cost review cadence with engineering managers.
We were bleeding $175K per month on resources nobody owned. CloudForge found savings we didn't know existed, built dashboards that made cost everyone's responsibility, and the anomaly detection has already caught three billing surprises that would have gone unnoticed until the quarterly review.
— CFO, European Cloud-Native SaaS Platform
Native AWS cost analysis with granular filtering by service, account, tag, and usage type — providing the raw data foundation for reserved instance recommendations and anomaly detection across AWS organizations.
Azure-specific cost analysis and optimization with budget alerting, advisor recommendations, and integration with Azure Reserved VM Instances and Savings Plans for commitment-based discount management.
Kubernetes cost attribution engine providing per-pod, per-namespace, and per-label cost allocation — essential for shared cluster environments where team-level showback requires workload-granular cost data.
Infrastructure-as-code cost forecasting that shows cost impact of Terraform changes in pull requests before deployment — shifting cost awareness left into the development workflow.
Multi-cloud cost governance platform providing unified dashboards, policy-based optimization recommendations, and reserved instance management across AWS, Azure, and GCP from a single pane.
Intelligent workload scheduling that automatically manages spot and preemptible instances — placing fault-tolerant workloads on discounted capacity with automated fallback to on-demand when spot markets tighten.
Quick wins deployed — orphaned resources eliminated, oversized instances right-sized, and immediate savings of $50K+ realized from low-hanging optimizations identified in the billing audit.
Full audit complete and attribution dashboards live — comprehensive cost report delivered, team-level showback dashboards operational, and reserved capacity recommendations modeled.
FinOps operating model active — monthly cost review cadence established with engineering managers, budget alerting configured, and Infracost integrated into pull request workflows.
Anomaly detection tuned and optimization cadence self-sustaining — billing anomaly alerts calibrated to minimize noise, quarterly reserved capacity rebalancing scheduled, and FinOps maturity at Walk stage.
Cloud cost audits completed across AWS, Azure, GCP, and multi-cloud environments — with $21.7M cumulative savings identified across 127 audits. Our FinOps practitioners have seen every pattern of cloud waste, from forgotten GPU instances running 24/7 to savings plans misconfigured to cover the wrong instance families. This pattern recognition means we find savings faster and more comprehensively than teams auditing their own spend for the first time.
Our FinOps practitioners don't just audit and leave — they build sustainable cost cultures. The difference between a one-time audit and a FinOps operating model is the difference between a diet and a lifestyle change. We establish the dashboards, review cadences, alerting rules, and organizational habits that prevent cost regression. Our clients consistently maintain their savings for 12+ months after engagement completion without ongoing CloudForge involvement.
Certified FinOps Practitioners with deep experience across all three major cloud billing APIs. We understand the nuances of AWS Reserved Instances versus Savings Plans, Azure Reserved VM Instances versus Azure Savings Plans, and GCP Committed Use Discounts versus Flex Committed Use Discounts. This depth matters — the wrong commitment strategy can lock you into unused capacity that costs more than on-demand.
We align engineering and finance teams, not just cut bills. Cloud cost optimization fails when it is treated as a finance initiative imposed on engineering. Our approach embeds cost awareness into engineering workflows — Infracost in pull requests showing cost impact before merge, Kubecost dashboards in team standups, and engineering managers who can explain their team's cloud spend as fluently as their sprint velocity.
Let's start with a technical conversation about your specific needs.