FinOps · Case study

Finding 30% in the Azure bill

On RELEX’s central cloud platform team, I led the FinOps work across the company’s Azure estate: finding where the money went, fixing what was wasted, and putting governance in place so the savings lasted. Cloud expenses went down by 30%.

Role
Cloud Engineer → Senior Cloud Engineer at RELEX Solutions (2022–2024)
Author
Sanket Joshi, Azure cloud architect and DevOps engineer
Stack
  • Azure
  • FinOps
  • Cost optimization
  • Cloud governance
  • Terraform
  • FinOps Certified Engineer

30% lower cloud costs

The problem

I managed the enterprise Azure subscriptions that every product team built on. As more teams adopted Azure, the bill grew with them, and not all of that spend was doing useful work. Nobody could fix what nobody could see.

The architecture

Azure estate (every product team) → Inform (find the inefficiencies) → Optimize (improve utilization) → Operate (financial governance). Operate loops back to Azure estate: savings that last.

What I built

Inform: I looked across the subscriptions to find the infrastructure inefficiencies, so the conversation could start from facts.

Optimize: I worked with the teams that owned the resources to improve how they were used, instead of cutting blindly.

Operate: I strengthened financial governance, so cost stayed visible and owned after the first clean-up.

What I learned

FinOps is not a one-off clean-up.

The savings last when cost becomes part of how teams build: visible, owned and reviewed like any other engineering signal.

The result

A 30% reduction in cloud expenses, and a platform where cost is part of the engineering conversation.

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