Playbook
We are paying retail for workloads that have been running for two years
A platform team's stable workloads have been running for years on pay-as-you-go pricing. Reservations and savings plans have been discussed but never executed because no one owns the decision. A FinOps practitioner has been hired; the first deliverable is a defensible reservation strategy.
Trigger — Renewal opportunity; FinOps practitioner onboarded.
Good outcome — Reservation strategy live, idle resources cleaned up, 15–30% first-year savings without architectural change.