FinOps is becoming an essential skill for platform engineers in 2026. This episode provides a complete guide to the skills, certifications, and tools you need to add cloud cost management to your platform engineering toolkit.
📰 News Segment:
• GPG.fail documents 14 critical GnuPG vulnerabilities - check your signing tools
• MongoBleed CVE-2025-14847: Critical MongoDB exploit - patch immediately
• The Dangers of SSL Certificates: Catastrophic failure modes in automation
• Google Multi-Cluster Orchestrator: Cross-region K8s management (KubeCon 2025)
• GPG cleartext signature parsing vulnerabilities found
💡 Key Takeaways:
• Platform teams own 70%+ of cloud spending decisions
• FinOps + Platform Engineering = $175K+ compound skill premium
• Senior FinOps Engineers average $150K, top earners reach $250K
• 76% of organizations are increasing FinOps investment
• New certifications: FinOps for AI (March 2026), FinOps for Containers
🎯 Skills Covered:
• Tier 1: Cloud billing data, K8s cost allocation, unit economics
• Tier 2: FOCUS specification v1.3, OpenCost/Kubecost, showback/chargeback
• Tier 3: Automated rightsizing, committed use discounts, AI workload optimization
🔗 Resources:
• FinOps Foundation: finops.org
• OpenCost (CNCF): opencost.io
• FOCUS Specification: focus.finops.org
• Episode page: platformengineering.org/podcasts/00073-finops-2026-platform-engineers-guide
#FinOps #PlatformEngineering #CloudCost #Kubernetes #DevOps #CNCF #OpenCost
