FinOps is the discipline of treating cloud spend as a continuously-managed variable, not a fixed budget line. The practice covers: tagging resources so spend can be attributed to product or team, tracking unit economics (cost per active user, per order, per inference call), forecasting + budgeting against business growth, and quarterly RI (Reserved Instance) or Savings Plan commitments.
The discipline matters more in 2026 than it did three years ago because cloud spend is now a material P&L line for most digital-first businesses, and the optimisation surface is wide: right-sizing instances, schedule-stopping non-prod, switching to graviton, S3 storage class transitions, RDS to Aurora Serverless, CloudFront price-class optimisation, Reserved Instance and Savings Plan portfolios.
For Indian enterprises with multi-region footprints (India + GCC + UK), a quarterly FinOps review with cost-per-region + cost-per-product breakdown is the cadence that keeps cloud spend honest.