Episode 16

FinOps, with Alison McIntyre

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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