Idle vs. Ideal Resources: The Promise of Intent-Aware FinOps – ITPro Today

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Here’s why effective FinOps demands an intent-aware approach, which goes beyond mere cost reduction.
August 4, 2025
By Eric Ethridge, DoiT
It's the classic before-and-after story in FinOps. It starts with a heatmap showing massive underutilization of resources and ends with impressive results: "We managed to lower cloud costs by 17% during this period." But what happens the next month when this easy win throws off your service-level agreement? What about when your operations team suddenly realizes every CPU core is struggling to keep up with demand?
Let's look at three common mistakes when it comes to cloud spending. First, resist the urge to simply cut anything pricey without first understanding its purpose and value. Second, recognize that a busy workload doesn't automatically equate to usefulness or value for customers. And third, avoid the trap of thinking that fixing one small, isolated part will miraculously solve all your overarching cloud spending issues.
Effective FinOps demands an intent-aware approach. While line items and dashboards offer value, a comprehensive understanding of spending requires context. Individuals should not be held accountable for cloud expenditures without a clear grasp of how each dollar contributes to the overall architecture. Furthermore, optimization efforts cannot be considered successful if they negatively impact ROI or introduce risks in critical areas such as compliance or time-to-market.
Related:Capacity Constraints Are Holding Back Big 3 Cloud Vendor Growth
High utilization may look good on a dashboard but can hide a lot of waste. Here are three real-world examples where fixing a workload was more effective than any tweak.
Maximized capacity: A database was hovering around 90% IOPS (input/output operations per second) utilization. While Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) appeared fully utilized and efficient, a deeper dive revealed that each query was performing full table scans due to the absence of two critical indexes. Upon reintroducing these indexes, query latency plummeted by an order of magnitude (10X), allowing for a significant downscaling of the database instance to a more cost-effective tier while maintaining optimal performance.
Plateaued utilization: A GPU inference fleet was operating at only 60% utilization. Despite the costly Core GPUs being constantly active, the small model and individual request processing led to significant GPU idle time between calls. Implementing batching of at least 32 requests or transitioning to CPU-based inference substantially reduced the per-prediction cost.
Locked job: An Apache Spark job was consuming 70% CPU for four hours nightly due to a "locked job" scenario. The cluster appeared efficient, but 80% of the data was tied to a single, skewed key, causing tasks to run indefinitely without completion. By repartitioning and salting the key, the workload was optimized, allowing the job to finish in under an hour with a cluster one-third the original size.
Related:5 Tips for Implementing a Strong FinOps Program to Unlock Cloud’s Potential
In every instance, rightsizing only cut the bill a little, whereas fixing the workload delivered much greater savings and performance.
If you really want to succeed with FinOps, focus on the four intent-aware pillars:
Capturing context: Tie each cost to a workload and owner. Also link them to a business KPI formula that measures revenue per request, build minutes saved, and compliance guidelines met. Numbers only have value if they tell a story.
Interrogate for intent: When it comes to each resource, ask yourself, "What 'promise' does this fulfill?"Don't make assumptions. If nobody can remember what the resource's intent was, you may find it's now obsolete.
Fix, then rightsize: When it comes to workloads, look for design waste like polling loops and missing indexes. Eliminating such waste can lower costs and improve performance, allowing you tothen resize and decommission, as needed.
Be safe and document steps: Automate changes behind guardrails such as SLAs, tier of security, or compliance guidelines. Be sure to note new intents so they don't have to be reinvestigated in the future.
Related:FinOps Cloud Cost Management Evolves Beyond Traditional Boundaries
To enhance your FinOps efforts, establish a baseline using KPIs that encompass both business costs and customer-facing metrics. During workload reviews, foster collaboration between FinOps personnel and engineers, ensuring a centralized repository for context.
Equip yourself with tools for tagging, scheduling, and enforcing policies, complete with single-click rollback capabilities. Implement technology that correlates performance, reliability, and costs, then share these insights with dedicated teams who can leverage them effectively.
Intent-aware FinOps goes beyond mere cost reduction, focusing on continuous resource optimization. This ongoing commitment sustains and expands cloud adoption benefits, preventing cost creep and inefficiencies. Effective FinOps involves achieving initial savings and actively improving resource allocation, guided by business objectives, robust monitoring, and agile adaptation to evolving strategic goals.
About the author:
Eric Ethridge is a senior technical account manager at DoiT, where he guides customers of all sizes and industries through cloud adoption and optimization journeys.
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