3 Key Steps to Build a FinOps Ethos in Your Data Engineering Team

In today’s data-driven enterprises, the intersection of fiscal responsibility and technical innovation has never been more critical. As data processing costs continue to scale with business growth, building a FinOps culture within your Data Engineering team isn’t just about cost control, it’s about creating a mindset that views cost optimization as an integral part of technical excellence.

Unravel’s ‘actionability for everyone’ approach has enabled executive customers to adopt three transformative steps to embed FinOps principles into their Data Engineering team’s DNA, ensuring that cost awareness becomes as natural as code quality or data accuracy. In this article, we walk you through how executives can get the cost rating of their workloads from Uncontrolled to Optimized with clear, guided actionable pathways.

Step 1. Democratize cost visibility

The foundation of any successful FinOps implementation begins with transparency. However, raw cost data alone isn’t enough-it needs to be contextualized and actionable.

Breaking Down the Cost Silos

• Unravel provides real-time cost attribution dashboards to map cloud spending to specific business units, teams, projects, and data pipelines.

• The custom views allow different stakeholders, from engineers to executives to discover top actions to control cost spends.
• The ability to track key metrics like cost/savings per job/query, time-to-value, and wasted costs due to idleness, wait times, etc., transforms cost data from a passive reporting tool to an active management instrument.

Provide tools for cost decision making

Modern data teams need to understand how their architectural and implementation choices affect the bottom line. Unravel provides visualizations and insights to guide these teams to implement:

• Pre-deployment cost impact assessments for new data pipelines (for example, what is the cost impact of migrating this workload from All-purpose compute to Job compute?).
• What-if analysis tools for infrastructure changes (for example, will changing from the current instance types to recommended instance types affect performance if I save on cost?).
• Historical trend analysis to identify cost patterns, budget overrun costs, cost wasted due to optimizations neglected by their teams, etc.

Step 2. Embed cost intelligence into the development and operations lifecycles

The next evolution in FinOps maturity comes from making cost optimization an integral part of the development process, not a post-deployment consideration. Executives should consider leveraging specialized AI agents across their technology stack that helps to boost productivity and free up their teams’ time to focus on innovation. Unravel provides a suite of AI-agents driven features that foster cost ethos in the organization and maximizes operational excellence with auto-fix capabilities.

Automated Optimization Lifecycle
Unravel helps you establish a systematic approach to cost optimization with automated AI-agentic workflows to help your teams operationalize recommendations while getting a huge productivity boost. Below are some ways to drive automation with Unravel agents:

• Implement automated fix suggestions for most code and configuration inefficiencies
•  Assign auto-fix actions to AI agents for effortless adoption or route them to a human reviewer for approval
• Configure automated rollback capabilities for changes if unintended performance or cost degradation is detected

Push Down Cost Consciousness To Developers 

• Automated code reviews that flag potential cost inefficiencies
• Smart cost savings recommendations based on historical usage patterns
• Allow developers to see the impact of their change on future runs

Define Measurable Success Metrics
Executives can track the effectiveness of FinOps awareness and culture using Unravel through:

• Cost efficiency improvements over time (WoW, MoM, YTD)
• Team engagement and rate of adoption with Accountability dashboards
• Time-to-resolution for code and configuration changes

Step 3. Create a self-sustaining FinOps culture

The final and most crucial step is transforming FinOps from an initiative into a cultural cornerstone of your data engineering practice.

Operationalize with AI agents

FinOps AI Agent

Implement timely alerting systems that help to drive value-oriented decisions for cost optimization and governance. Unravel provides email, Slack, Teams integrations for ensuring all necessary stakeholders get timely notifications and insights into opportunities and risks.

DataOps AI Agent

• Pipeline optimization suggestions for better resource utilization and mitigate SLA risks
• Job signature level cost and savings impact analysis to help with prioritization of recommendations
• Intelligent workload migration recommendations

Data Engineering AI Agent

• Storage tier optimization recommendations to avoid wasted costs due to cold tables
• Partition strategy optimization for cost-effective querying
• Avoid recurring failures and bottlenecks due to inefficiencies not acted upon for several weeks

Continuous Evolution

Finally, it is extremely important to foster and track the momentum of FinOps growth by:

• Regularly performing FinOps retrospectives with wider teams
• Revisiting which Business units and Cost Centers are contributing to wasted costs, neglected cost due to unadopted recommendations and budget overruns despite timely alerting

The path forward

Building a FinOps ethos in your Data Engineering team is a journey that requires commitment, tools, and cultural change. By following the above three key steps – democratizing cost visibility, embedding cost intelligence, and creating a self-sustaining culture – you can transform how your team thinks about and manages cloud costs.

The most successful implementations don’t treat FinOps as a separate discipline but rather as an integral part of technical excellence. When cost optimization becomes as natural as writing tests or documenting code, you have achieved true FinOps maturity. Unravel provides a comprehensive set of features and tools to aid your teams in accelerating FinOps best practices throughout the organization.

Remember, the goal isn’t just to reduce costs – it is to maximize the value derived from every dollar spent on your infrastructure. This mindset shift, combined with the right tools and processes, will position your data engineering team for sustainable growth and success in an increasingly cost-conscious technology landscape.

To learn more on how Unravel can help, contact us or request a demo.