Insights • Cloud

FinOps: The Second Wave

Why the next 18 months of FinOps will look more like product management than spreadsheet discipline.

Author: Daniel Okafor
Role: Director, Cloud Practice
Published: January 30, 2026
Read time: 4 min read

FinOps started as cost visibility. The next wave is about unit economics — cost per transaction, per tenant, per inference call — and the engineering changes those metrics drive.

The shift in mindset Treat cost like latency. It is a system property that engineering teams own day to day, with FinOps providing the platform, telemetry, and shared language.

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