FinOps In Full Bloom

Ebony Sykes is the founder of InsurSuccess, a firm helping independent Medicare insurance agents build financial data sovereignty and operational efficiency in an AI-enabled market. Her core argument is simple and countercultural: before you automate anything, get your processes right - because AI scaled on top of broken workflows just produces more broken outcomes, faster. This episode covers how...

This episode covers how Emily Allen used CloudZero data to analyze AI tool usage across her organization, identify model-level inefficiencies — specifically the over-reliance on Claude Opus for tasks better suited to Sonnet — and generate approximately $30K in annualized savings through targeted conversations with internal teams. She also addresses the broader challenge finance leaders face with A...

This episode covers how Corin is approaching the new layer of complexity that AI introduces: governing access without blocking engineering velocity, building a centralized LLM API gateway (LiteLLM) to provide secure, auditable, and cost-attributed AI access at scale, and keeping an eye on the cloud spend that teams are quietly leaving behind while chasing the next model release. He also shares how...

Brian Mullins is the Head of Engineering at Diaceutics, a platform company improving patient identification in precision medicine. He brings a technically grounded, detective-minded approach to FinOps — one built on granular telemetry, unit cost modeling, and the discipline of not optimizing prematurely. This episode covers how Brien's team doubled platform query volume while holding costs flat by...

In this solo-hosted recap episode, Thalia Elie reflects on the key insights, transformations, and moments of inspiration from the first season of FinOps in Full Bloom . From CloudZero customers and internal leaders to global FinOps advocates, Thalia shares what she’s learned, what moved her, and what’s coming next in the journey to cost clarity and cultural change. This episode features solo comme...

What does it take to drive FinOps maturity across a multi-cloud, acquisition-heavy enterprise? In this episode of FinOps in Full Bloom, host Thalia Elie sits down with Greg Colletti, Senior Principal Service Partner at Progress, to talk about building FinOps maturity brick by brick—from account naming and tagging to cross-team buy-in and automation. Greg shares how Progress implemented the FOCUS f...

In this episode of FinOps in Full Bloom, DebraAnn Braun, Chief Solutions and Advisory Officer at UbiMinds, shares how AI is transforming FinOps - when done right. She outlines how to measure innovation velocity, build trust between humans and AI, and create self-healing budgets with agentic AI. If you’ve been overwhelmed by where to start or how to scale, this episode offers a clear, value-driven...

Bindu Sharma, Senior Director of Cloud FinOps at Teradata and FinOps Foundation sustainability leader, joins FinOps in Full Bloom to share her transformation story - from manual reporting to enterprise-scale optimization. In this episode, Bindu explores how to embed cost-aware culture, why carbon metrics matter, and how AI is reshaping both FinOps and her personal growth. Bindu Sharma leads global...

When you make the invisible visible, everything changes. In this episode of FinOps in Full Bloom , host Thalia Elie sits down with cloud engineering veteran Sam Marx to unpack how visibility, trust, and culture shift when FinOps practices take root. Sam shares how CloudZero helped his team replace manual reporting, build cross-functional alignment, and empower teams with real-time insights. If you...

Director of IT Service Desk Operations and FinOps at Best Egg, Melissa Canfield, joins FinOps in Full Bloom to share how she helped lead a FinOps transformation rooted in visibility, tagging accountability, and culture change. From completing her FinOps Pro certification to achieving 50%+ resource tagging, Melissa’s story is one of persistence, collaboration, and bringing engineering along for the...

What does it take to unlock massive cost savings - without compromising performance or compliance? In this episode, host Thalia Elie sits down with Tyler Lynch, Field CTO at IBM supporting HashiCorp, to share stories of strategic savings, AI cost modeling, and why aligning FinOps to business value - not just uptime or savings - is the future. From time complexity to Terraform, Tyler breaks down wh...

Balaji Narayanan shares how Clari’s FinOps practice became a cross-functional team effort where visibility, finance–engineering alignment, and a culture of shared accountability create the energy to drive sustained optimization, innovation, and long-term business value. Balaji Narayanan is VP of Infrastructure and Engineering at Clari. With over 25 years of experience managing large-scale systems,...

If you've implemented all the "right" FinOps practices and costs are still climbing, this episode is for you. Host Thalia Elie welcomes Erik Norman — CEO of Caligo and self-proclaimed “FinOps troublemaker” — for a candid and insightful discussion on what really drives cost, value, and culture in engineering. From eliminating millions of unnecessary API calls to cutting 98% of cloud spend in one en...

How do you go from zero to FinOps maturity without losing focus—or momentum? In this episode, host Thalia Elie is joined by Anderson Oliveira, FinOps Account Manager at CloudZero and longtime FinOps leader, to share the repeatable formula he uses to drive real results: visibility, budgeting, and unit economics. From challenging assumptions about cost optimization to crafting business value from ev...

What does it really take to build a scalable, impactful FinOps practice from the inside out? In this episode of FinOps in Full Bloom , host Thalia Elie is joined by Larry Advey, aka Fred FinOps, Director of Cloud Platform and FinOps at CloudZero. From his work on the FinOps Foundation's TAC to his leadership at companies like Twilio and CloudZero, Larry shares what it means to align teams, deliver...

How do you reduce cloud spend by 50% without compromising availability or velocity? In this episode of FinOps in Full Bloom , host Thalia Elie speaks with Anthony Leung, VP of Engineering Platforms and Security Research at Forcepoint, about driving radical transformation through visibility, accountability, and the right tooling. From managing 600 developers in CloudZero to deploying unit metrics a...

What does real FinOps transformation look like at the ground level? In this episode, host Thalia Elie sits down with Kellie Righini, Associate Director of Business Systems and Applications at Aras, to explore what it takes to shift a culture from chaos to collaboration. From siloed tagging to unified dashboards, Kellie shares how she used listening, leadership, and a lot of tagging to bring financ...