Playbook
We're paying retail prices for workloads that have run for two years
The platform team's stable workloads have been running for years on pay-as-you-go pricing. Reservations and savings plans have come up in conversation but never happened because no one owns the decision. A FinOps practitioner has just been hired; the first deliverable is a defensible reservation strategy.
Trigger — Renewal opportunity; new FinOps practitioner in post.
Good outcome — The customer is paying 15–30 % less in the first year on the same workloads — no architecture change, no risk. The unused resources are gone, and there's a quarterly check to keep it that way.