Episode 16

FinOps, with Alison McIntyre

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June 13th, 2025

1 hr 32 mins 27 secs

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About this Episode

Alison McIntyre, Director of Cloud Economics at Capgemini gives us a tour of modern FinOps, and the state of FinOps report

  • Michael is investigating Liberating Structures
  • Mark doesn't know what a Clementine is
  • Alison gets in on the ground floor on a new FinOps project

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Who is Alison McIntyre?

IT support -> Scottish Parliament -> Lloyds Bank -> Capgemini, with some stories along the way!

Quickfire Questions:

  • What is one FinOps practice you take into your personal life?
  • What is the most likely offender of unnecessary spend in your experience?
  • Which roles are most receptive to the introduction of FinOps concepts?
  • What is one memory that sticks out from interviewing Michael?
  • What is the biggest misconception about FinOps?
  • What is the most memorable reaction you’ve seen when you’ve shown someone the cloud spend their team is accountable for?
  • What is FOCUS?
  • What is Cloud Plus, and Scopes?

Breaking Prod

Alison will happily unplug your network cables for you

Big Topic: FinOps

  • The term ‘unit economics’ comes up in all the literature, what does it mean
  • What is the structure of that team? What sort of roles exist in a team like this when a company decides to have one?
  • If you have an internal developer platform, does chargeback need to include the cost of the team developing that platform?
  • What if other teams internally aren’t willing to eat that cost? Can they reject the Internal Developer Platform and do it themselves?
  • Is there a lot of tooling provided by the hyperscalers?
  • Is it significantly harder to track consumption with on-premise infra?

News

We cover the 2025 State of FinOps report
We get hot takes from our expert.

"Workload optimization and waste reduction is the top priority by a clear margin"
"In the next 12 months, governance and optimization are top for future priorities"
"“Organizational Alignment” still the top way to achieve priorities but “Investment and Tooling” has risen significantly"
"Practitioners are increasing effort in many capabilities while reducing effort in very few"

Recommendations

FinOps

Books

  • Unlearn audiobook (audible)
  • 1984 Audiobook, featuring Andrew Garfield, Cynthia Erivo, Andrew Scott and Tom Hardy

TV & Film

Music

Technology

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