· FinOps · 2 min read
Agentic FinOps: The End of Passive Cloud Reporting
Don't just watch your cloud bill grow. Implement FinOps agents that actively right-size instances, purchase spot nodes, and kill zombie resources 24/7.
Cloud waste is the silent budget killer. Engineers spin up large EC2 instances for testing, forget them over the weekend, and alert fatigue means the “High Cost” notifications from AWS are ignored until the invoice arrives.
Traditional FinOps is reactive. You look at a dashboard, see you overspent last month, and send an angry email. Agentic FinOps is proactive and autonomous. It stops the bleeding before it hurts.
The Active Cost Defence
An Agentic FinOps system does not just monitor; it governs. It has permissions to modify infrastructure based on strict policy rules defined by your engineering leadership.
1. Zombie Resource Hunter
Storage volumes (EBS) that are unattached to any instance are pure waste. Load balancers with no listeners are money down the drain. A Cleanup Agent scans your environment hourly. If it finds a detached volume older than 48 hours without a specific “Keep-Alive” tag, it snapshots it (for safety) and then deletes the volume.
2. Spot Instance Arbitrage
Running stateless workloads on On-Demand instances is throwing money away. A Spot Agent continuously monitors the spot market price. If your container cluster can tolerate interruptions, the agent autonomously swaps On-Demand nodes for Spot instances when the price differential is favourable, often saving 60-80% on compute costs.
3. Dynamic Rightsizing
Engineers often over-provision “just in case.” An Optimisation Agent watches CPU and memory utilisation over a 7-day period. If an instance never exceeds 10% utilisation, the agent waits for a maintenance window, resizes the instance family to a smaller tier, and reboots it—instantly reducing the hourly run rate.
Safety and Governance
The key to automated infrastructure management is safety. Agentic FinOps is not untethered Chaos Monkey.
- Tag-Based Exclusion: Critical production databases are tagged
finops:exclude. The agents strictly respect these boundaries. - Dry-Run Mode: Initially, agents operate in “Shadow Mode,” logging what they would have done. Once you trust their logic, you enable “Active Mode.”
Why Alps Agility?
At Alps Agility, we combine deep cloud expertise with advanced AI automation. We help you implement FinOps agents that cut your cloud bill while improving your operational hygiene.
Contact us today to start saving on your cloud infrastructure automatically.
