We Open-Sourced Our FinOps Brain. Here's Why.

Table of contents

The Problem

LLMs know about FinOps the way they know about most professional frameworks — broadly, generically, and without the structured detail that makes advice grounded.

Ask an LLM to “optimize my AWS costs” and you’ll get reasonable-sounding advice: right-size instances, use Savings Plans, implement tagging. All correct. All vague.

The Foundation publishes a framework with specific capabilities, maturity criteria, functional activities by role, and measures of success. That structure exists in public GitHub repos. But LLMs don’t have it loaded as working context — they hallucinate a plausible-sounding version instead.

What’s in the Skill

What’s transcribed (from Foundation repos)

Every reference file traces to a specific upstream source. No custom content in the reference directory.

From finopsfoundation/framework:

• All capabilities — each with definition, Crawl/Walk/Run maturity criteria, functional activities by persona, measures of success, and inputs
• All domains — with descriptions and capability mappings
• All personas — with primary goals, objectives, frustrations, key metrics, and FinOps benefits

From FOCUS_Spec:

• Specification overview, design principles, conformance rules
• Cost and Usage dataset with all column definitions
• Glossary of terms

From finopsfoundation/kpis:

• KPI definitions from the community
• Waste sensor definitions — standardized IDs, descriptions, and methodology for calculating savings opportunities and waste percentages

What’s custom (just the routing)

SKILL.md is the only custom file. It contains:

• Expert advisor prompt — persona adaptation, quality standards, engagement modes
• Business problem routing table — maps user questions to relevant Foundation capabilities
• Condition-keyed loading — detects what the user is asking about and loads only the relevant reference files

This means the skill loads a couple of files for a targeted question, not the whole knowledge base. “How should I structure Savings Plans?” loads the commitment discounts capability. “Full maturity assessment” loads all capabilities systematically by domain.

Try It

Install in any project:

npx skills add suan-digital/cloud-finops

Then try:

• “Assess our FinOps maturity” — walks through capabilities using Crawl/Walk/Run criteria
• “How should I structure Savings Plans?” — routes to commitment discounts capability
• “We can’t attribute costs to teams” — routes to cost allocation + shared costs
• “Compare costs across our AWS and GCP accounts” — routes to FOCUS spec + data normalization

GitHub: suan-digital/cloud-finops

For a tailored FinOps assessment or advisory engagement: suan.digital/contact