Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Want to start chaos engineering? Don't randomly break stuff and hope for the best. Real chaos engineering starts with defining your system's steady state metrics like latency, throughput, and error rates. Then you form a clear hypothesis about what should happen when failures occur. Next, you inject controlled failures, starting small with single pod kills or network drops, not production meltdowns. Finally, you limit the blast radius by running experiments in safe environments first.

In this episode of FinOps on Azure, Michael Stephenson sits down with Frank Contrepois, independent FinOps voice and co-host of The FinOps Guys podcast — to explore what it really means to manage cloud costs from a business-first perspective. Frank has been in the FinOps space for nearly a decade and brings a genuinely different angle to the conversation. His background in commodity trading at Strategic Blue (a Morgan Stanley spinoff) shaped how he thinks about reserved instances, commitment strategies, and why most teams approach cost management the wrong way round.

AI adoption is already happening on your team, whether you have a strategy or not. Tracy Lee (CEO of This Dot Labs, Microsoft MVP, Google Developer Expert) breaks down the AI Enablement Flywheel — a 6-pillar framework used by successful engineering organizations to move from scattered experimentation to scalable, ROI-positive AI workflows.