The FinOps Foundation states that “For the first time, Reducing waste was the highest key priority for FinOps practitioners across all spending tiers. This may be influenced by macroeconomic trends, with businesses looking for ways to reduce spending without reducing the value they are getting from their cloud investments.”

In cloud-native environments, autoscaling and optimization are often confused, yet they serve different purposes. While Kubernetes offers several built-in autoscaling features, these are often mistaken for optimization. In reality, autoscaling is reactive, responding to changing demands, whereas optimization is proactive, focused on configuring workloads efficiently from the start.