How does your team approach FinOps best practices to optimize cloud costs while ensuring performance? Any insights on budgeting, cost monitoring, or application rationalization that have worked well for you?

We have implemented several controls:
1. Cost monitoring tool that is reviewed every two weeks to try to forecast cost expenditure and take appropriate decisions.
2. Cost level approval for the technical team, they can add resources if the impact to the monthly cost isn't more that 1%, the next management level could approve up to 10% deviation.  If cost impact is more than 10%, executive approval is needed and justification from petitioner is mandatory.

Agree with Cord's statement that having the team educated on the topic is foundational important.  We utilize a mix of data driven decision making (monitoring and analysis tools) along with user and PO feedback (is the system performing to expectations) to find the balance that works for all.  Which comes back to education: it's essential that the business understands the cost of 'always on' availability and providing clear options for dialing down during off-peak...and the resultant cost savings.

As a sidebar: I've co-opted the term 'FinOps' to be a more holistic cost optimization approach for all IT assets (hardware, software and cloud).  This has simplified my messaging for the C-Suite on these topics as well as an easier to understand approach for the IT teams managing those assets (operationally and financially).

The entire team needs to be educated to become cost sensitive. We also have the luxury that the Cloud PO is an MBA and strong in tech and finance. Finally it helps to have good tools which indicate potential savings. Obviously we also have a service mgr who only focuses on costs and invoicing - he is managing costs using savings plans and other suitable commitments, ie he does financial engineering. We also have regular cost optimization meetings with the hypervisors and we work on private pricing for some services.