FinOps Certified Engineer case studies
FinOps Certified Engineer · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The FinOps Certified Engineer (FCE) is an intermediate-level credential from the FinOps Foundation aimed at engineers who design, develop, and deliver infrastructure in the cloud. The catalog positions the self-paced course plus exam at 500, covering 2 modules with 12 months of access to course content and the certification exam. The FinOps Certified Engineer case studies are 5 cases and about 3,334 words.
1Allocating shared and idle cost in a multi-tenant cluster
Your company runs three production Kubernetes clusters in one cloud account: 240 nodes across general-purpose, memory-optimized, and spot node pools, costing 412,000 last month. OpenCost reports that 18% of spend ( 74,160) is unallocated: control-plane fees, cluster-wide logging and ingress, DaemonSets, and idle capacity from over-provisioned node pools.
737 words, about 4 min2Rightsizing requests without breaking latency SLOs
A 1,200-deployment cluster costs $96,000/month; 68% of the bill is memory-optimized nodes. Requests, not usage, drive node count: total CPU requests are 48,000 cores against a 95th-percentile usage of 15,800 cores; memory requests are 150 TiB against a 95th-percentile of 72 TiB.
692 words, about 3 min3Spot diversification and commitment coverage for batch and API
A media-processing platform runs 100,000 vCPU-hours of batch transcoding each month plus a 24×7 API. Spot instances cost 0.012/vCPU-hour; on-demand costs 0.042.
630 words, about 3 min4GPU chargeback with reservations and idle capacity
A research platform runs 64 A100 GPUs across eight nodes for model training and inference. Monthly GPU compute is $118,000.
645 words, about 3 min5Savings plan renewal during a container migration
A container platform's annual cloud bill is 5.4M. Of that, 3.1M is EC2 compute covered by a compute savings plan purchased three years ago at a $1.6M/year commitment; the plan expires in 60 days and currently covers 78% of eligible compute with 99.2% utilization.
630 words, about 3 min