This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Every month the company receives a cloud bill, and every month someone asks why it is so expensive. The answer is usually missing or sounds like "it is complicated". Here are 154 tools to answer it: 79 ready-to-use procedures, templates, checklists, AI prompts and formulas, 65 models and methods, 1 service shown on screen and 9 working files.

Open a lecture, take the workbook, run it on your own bill this week.

This is not a cloud problem

Costs grow faster than the business, no one knows which team consumes the most, and development and test environments run around the clock even when nobody uses them at night. The cloud is doing what it was told. What is missing is a system that connects spend to owners, decisions and value.

What changes after this course

You can read the bill and explain every large line. Costs are allocated to the teams and products that create them. Waste is removed without hurting the product. The CTO and the CFO look at the same dashboard. And FinOps runs as a function with a roadmap, a workflow, governance and a defined role.

A note on the structure

The first six lessons are the FinOps core: profession and maturity, the bill, allocation, optimisation, analytics and implementation. Two further sections give the financial context: business and financial models, budgeting and KPIs, and a CFO view of cloud cost, from risk and cash flow to investment decisions and reporting to investors.

What is inside: 154 tools, counted lecture by lecture

You do not have to take this number on trust. Open any lecture and read its description: every tool inside is listed there by name.

• 47 downloadable resources: the lecture presentations plus 9 working files, from the FinOps maturity assessment to the 90-day FinOps implementation workbook
• 79 ready-to-use tools inside the presentations:
• 18 step-by-step procedures and workflows: FinOps implementation, showback to chargeback implementation, cloud resource rightsizing, unit economics implementation
• 17 templates and sample documents: cloud tagging schema, cost allocation model, CFO dashboard, executive FinOps report
• 12 checklists: FinOps readiness, cloud account analysis, spot instance suitability, FinOps quick wins
• 12 ready AI prompts: cloud tag audit, cost allocation model, rightsizing analysis, Savings Plan strategy
• 9 formulas and metric sets: FinOps success metrics, cost allocation metrics, cloud optimization metrics, financial KPIs
• 7 scorecards, rubrics and matrices: cloud pricing options comparison, cloud optimization prioritization, FinOps metrics by role, RACI matrix
• 4 question lists and scripts: FinOps stakeholder communication, FinOps engineering communication, FinOps finance communication
• 65 models and methods explained with examples: FinOps framework, Crawl Walk Run maturity model, showback and chargeback, unit economics
• 1 service shown on screen: Yahoo Finance

Where the tools are

• The FinOps core (6 sections, 81 tools). Profession and maturity, cloud bills, allocation and chargeback, optimisation, dashboards and unit economics, implementation.
• Financial models and cost efficiency (1 section, 34 tools). Business and financial models, process cost, goals, budgeting, KPIs and Lean Six Sigma.
• CFO finance strategy for FinOps (1 section, 47 tools). Planning, risk, cost controls, unit economics, budgets, pricing, capital budgeting, financing and reporting.

Who is teaching

I am Mike, the #1 HR instructor on Udemy, with 1,800,000+ course enrollments from 170,000 students, and the author of about 200 books on Amazon. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn and worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank across 20 years in HR. I hold PHRi, SHRM-CP and HCI sHRBP certifications and represent HRCI in Eastern Europe. I am also a founder and lead the strategy of my own academy.

At Wargaming I watched a company learn cost discipline. For years revenue grew much faster than costs, and almost any request was approved. When growth slowed, travel alone for several thousand people passed 10 million dollars a year. The finance director showed two trajectories, one up and one down, and the company changed its behaviour through communication rather than orders. Later I defended a research project there with one line on a slide: we spend about 97 million dollars a year on people without understanding its effect. Cloud cost needs the same kind of visibility.

How to use the course

Start with the six core lessons and run your own bill through their workbooks. Then use the finance sections when you need to explain cloud cost to the CFO or the board. Section and lecture titles show how many tools are inside, and each lecture description lists them by name.

What is included

• 39 lectures across 9 sections, 28 hours
• 47 downloadable resources: lecture presentations and nine working files
• 154 tools across the lessons
• A 10-question practice test, a quiz and a role play
• Lifetime access to all materials
• Active instructor support in the Q&A section
• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

Where to start

Open last month's cloud bill and mark every line you cannot attribute to a team. Then open the allocation lecture. Enrol now and start your first lesson today.