The Cloud Bill Nobody Was Watching ft. Michael Graff | Ep #80
Is your biggest cloud cost problem something a dashboard would never catch until you go looking for it yourself?
This week's episode of FinOps in Action takes a different shape, with PointFive Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer Gal Ben-David stepping in to host a conversation with Mike Graff, Infrastructure Architecture Director at Dolby Laboratories and a FinOps Ambassador. Mike shares a couple of real cost inefficiencies he's tracked down in the wild, then the conversation opens up into bigger questions about where FinOps is headed from new roles emerging on the engineering side to how AI might change the way teams find and fix waste. It's a grounded, practitioner-led episode for anyone trying to close the gap between what engineering builds and what finance sees on the bill.
Here’s what we talked about:
Small misconfigurations can hide big costs. A couple of the “craziest” inefficiencies Mike’s found weren’t exotic, they were simple settings almost anyone could miss, and easy to fix once spotted.
Platform tools don’t always keep pace with the cloud. Vendors can lag behind what cloud providers already support, and Mike argues teams shouldn’t just accept those gaps.
Cost optimization and security fight the same uphill battle. Both compete for engineering attention against feature deadlines and both benefit from getting into the conversation earlier.
The FinOps role may be split in two. Mike and Gal dig into whether cost efficiency is becoming its own engineering discipline, separate from the finance side of FinOps.
You don’t need a title to start. Many practitioners begin as a side project, start small, find one win, and let momentum build.
"It all starts somewhere. It starts with poking into that data transfer dashboard and figuring out what's going on. Just get those wins, chipping away at the low hanging fruit.” - Michael Graff
Connect with Michael:
Website: https://www.dolby.com/
In this episode of FinOps in Action, PointFive Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer Gal Ben-David sits down with Mike Graff, Infrastructure Architecture Director at Dolby Laboratories, to make the case that closing the gap between engineering and finance takes more than a mandate from the top, it takes technical fluency on the ground. Mike breaks down why some of the costliest inefficiencies are hiding in plain sight and easy to fix once someone knows to look, how cost optimization and security fight the same uphill battle for engineering attention, why the FinOps role may be splitting into a distinct engineering discipline as organizations scale, and why you don't need a title or a mandate to start, just curiosity and one early win.