How to prepare cost evolution reports and dashboards and their importance

As we have explained time and time again, understanding how our cloud costs are distributed is one of the first points we need to tackle for any FinOps practice.

But as important as this is, we also need to add a fundamental ingredient to the mix, which is to have clear visibility and understanding of how our costs shift up and down, growing or decreasing over time, which should be aligned with the usage we make of cloud resources, how many new projects are developed, as well as how many cloud resources are created or retired over time.

This alignment between costs and cloud demand is of the utmost importance, as misalignment can quickly lead to cloud waste and overspending. This misalignment can happen for many reasons outside our control, such as misconfiguration, changes in cloud services or how they are billed, and changes in how we make use of our resources, among others, and it is on FinOps practitioners...