Steve Cole

Fifty-seven companies paid for booth space at FinOps X 2026 in San Diego, June 8 through 11. This is a field guide to what those sponsorships reveal. Taken individually, each is a marketing decision. Taken together, they are a market map: three patterns dominate the 2026 cohort, and the sponsor-by-sponsor

FinOps X 2026 will be held in San Diego next week, and I'm going. I've been around this discipline since before it had a name, and the run-up to the conference motivated me to sit down and dig into how the whole thing came to be.

Welcome to Sealand. Now Bugger Off. In 1942, the British Royal Navy drove two hollow concrete pylons into a sandbar called Rough Sands, 11 kilometers off the Suffolk coast, bolted a platform across the top, and stationed 150 sailors there to shoot at German aircraft. The war ended. The sailors

Ever stop to think about how many different ways you press the Enter key in a day? Maybe instead of Enter the one on your keyboard says Return, or maybe it has a broken arrow drawing on it. Not like Broken Arrow, the 90s blockbuster where John Travolta stole a

I like to simplify entropy as "the lowest energy state". The lowest energy state (highest entropy) in nature is not ordered, it's chaos. Or in simpler terms: broken. Leaking pipes, torn clothing, Xfinity offline. Stacking rocks can be challenging; identifying the flattest surfaces and orienting for

I remember seeing Forrest Gump in the theaters and telling myself I'm never going to know what's real or not on-screen. That feather and the "cameos". How long ago was that? Not sure I want to know. I'm starting to wonder where

Have a few ideas I'm cooking for the next couple blogs. In the meantime, I've been goofing around with a video idea for my explainer series. Scroll to the end for the video. Whether you read or watch, hope you enjoy... In the Beginning For years,

S3 Standard storage has been $0.023/GB to start since December 2016. AWS announced 107 price reductions between 2006 and 2021. The early reductions were significant because the early prices were high. Cloud was new, scale was small, and the providers were pricing to cover infrastructure they were still

I'm going hard today. Collating over 100 recent articles on the FinOps space and aggregating them down to a handful of select topics, this one stood out to me like a sore thumb, screaming for attention. This is going to be a bit longer than normal. Breaking News:

I built a system at Adobe called Spot Stack. It was tiered infrastructure provisioned by Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs) that delivered EC2 resources to a pre-Kubernetes container platform. It managed capacity well, and did so at the lowest cost possible. Inevitably, Auto Scaling groups improved, rendering the system I built