FinOps (Financial Operations) is an evolving cloud financial management discipline that brings together finance, engineering, and business stakeholders to maximize the business value of cloud investments. Born from the need to manage variable cloud consumption costs, FinOps creates financial accountability through cultural practices and technical guardrails. As of 2026, FinOps has expanded beyond traditional cloud to encompass SaaS, data centers, AI/GenAI workloads, and licensing, reflecting the reality that technology spend now spans multiple platforms. The FinOps Foundation defines this practice through an iterative framework of three phases—Inform, Optimize, and Operate—supported by capabilities across domains that mature from Crawl to Walk to Run stages. A key insight: FinOps is not about reducing costs at all costs, but about enabling teams to make informed trade-offs between speed, cost, and quality while maintaining engineering velocity.