The Price of Cost Awareness ft. Ruby Agarwal | Ep #76
What if the biggest cloud savings opportunity isn't hidden in your infrastructure, but in the decisions made before the first line of code is written?
In this episode of FinOps in Action, Taylor sits down with Ruby Agarwal, VP of Engineering at Avaya, whose responsibilities span engineering, DevOps, DevSecOps, CloudOps, and FinOps. Ruby shares how her team reduced cloud spend by 75% in just two months, why visibility matters more than perfect data, and how cost awareness becomes part of engineering culture rather than a one-time optimization project. They also explore how AI is changing operational decision-making and why the future of FinOps will depend on balancing innovation with discipline.
Here’s what they got into:
Start with visibility, not spreadsheets of despair. Ruby’s team didn’t need perfect data to cut 75% of spend, they needed a one slider view everyone could understand. Skip the 20 page report and focus your team’s attention on the handful of buckets driving most of the cost.
Cost isn’t the enemy, inefficiency is. Turning everything off would bring spending to zero, but that’s not the goal. The goal is getting the same performance, reliability, and security for less, not gutting the services delivering value.
Build your COGS model before you write code. On Avaya Infinity, Ruby’s team defined their cost model before a single line was written, and they publish and measure it every month. Bake cost discipline into the architecture from day one instead of cleaning up after launch.
Separate your AI innovation zone from your production zone. Let engineers experiment freely with the most powerful models while building, but production agents don’t need the flashiest reasoning model, they need the cheapest one that gets the job done reliably.
The skills that carry your career aren’t technical. Ruby calls systems thinking, structured decision making, communication, and connection building the real differentiators, not soft skills but critical skills. Investing in those early pays off longer than any single technology wave.
“ Your first cloud cost bill will be dependent on what architectural decisions you have made for your projects.” - Ruby Agarwal
Connect with Ruby:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rubyagarwal/
Website: https://www.avaya.com/en/
In this episode of FinOps in Action, Taylor Houck sits down with Ruby Agarwal, VP of Engineering at Avaya, to make the case that FinOps discipline has to be architectural from day one, not cleanup after the fact. Ruby breaks down how she cut cloud spend by roughly 75% in two months by building visibility first and turning cost awareness into a team habit rather than a mandate, how she splits AI into an "innovation zone" versus a "production zone" so experimentation stays free while production spend stays capped and matched to the simplest model for the job, and why the real risk ahead is intelligence scaling faster than governance, making cost discipline and clear decision-making from data more important than ever.