Building the Engine Behind Australia's First Managed FinOps Service Provider
Cloudec is the most experienced Cloud FinOps consultancy in the APAC region and the only Managed FinOps Service Provider (MFSP).
The Client
Cloudec is Australia’s first Managed FinOps Service Provider (MFSP) and the most experienced Cloud FinOps consultancy in the APAC region. They work with some of Australia’s largest cloud consumers — across entertainment, telecommunications, airlines, finance, and insurance — helping organisations gain visibility, optimise multi-cloud spend, and uplift their FinOps practice maturity.
Cloudec is partnered with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloudability, VMware Tanzu CloudHealth, Flexera, and Sonar. Their service offerings span FinOps advisory, cost optimisation assessments, managed services, and team augmentation.
What sets Cloudec apart commercially is the managed in MFSP: their experts don’t just advise, they actively run FinOps for their clients. To do that well — across multiple clients, multiple cost platforms, and multiple cloud providers — the team needed a purpose-built technology platform of their own.
The Challenge
Cloudec’s FinOps experts were spending too much time on the mechanics of getting to the answers, and not enough time on the answers themselves.
The core problem was cost data. Each client uses a different combination of cost management platforms — Cloudability, CloudHealth, native AWS billing, native Azure billing, sometimes more than one. Each platform presents its data differently, and none of it arrives in a state that’s immediately useful to a consultant trying to pinpoint a spend anomaly or build a recommendation. Getting to the actual financial picture for a client — what they were billed, what they’re really running at, where the trend is moving — took meaningful preparation work every time.
For a managed service running across a portfolio of clients, that fragmentation translated directly into consultant hours: time spent assembling and reconciling data that should have been ready and waiting before an expert ever opened a report.
There were three further capabilities the team wanted to operationalise alongside the reporting platform: their Cloud FinOps Maturity (CFM) assessment (currently run in spreadsheets and documents), their Cloudability business mapping management (workable in Cloudability’s UI at small scale, but a bottleneck at MFSP scale), and proactive cost alerting into the channels the team already uses.
The brief: build us the platform we need to deliver MFSP at scale — with cost reporting at its heart.
The Approach
Cost reporting dashboards, the heart of the platform
The portal is where Cloudec’s consultants spend their working day, and the cost reporting dashboard is where they start. For any client in the portfolio, a consultant opens the dashboard and sees the financial picture immediately: invoiced amount, amortised cost, and true run rate side-by-side; month-on-month movement on both invoice and run rate, with directional indicators; credits surfaced separately so they don’t distort the trend; and forecast for the period ahead. Tabs drill into detailed bill analysis and top spend by service. Year and month selectors let the team move through historical periods. Client switching is one dropdown away.
The point is what a consultant doesn’t have to do. They don’t pull data, reconcile it, work out which credits are masking which trend, or build the view themselves. They open the dashboard and start thinking. If March’s invoice is up 12% on February but the run rate is up only 9%, they see it instantly and know exactly where to look.
That’s the value the dashboard delivers, but it’s only possible because of the data work happening underneath it.
Cost data pipelines that do the hard work
Behind the dashboard sits a data pipeline that pulls cost information from whichever combination of platforms a client uses, reconciles it, and transforms it into the financial views consultants actually need. The pipeline handles the heavy lifting that would otherwise eat consultant time: normalising data across providers, reconciling raw billing figures into invoice / amortised / run rate views, classifying transaction types so credits and one-off charges don’t hide the underlying trend, and computing the period-over-period movements the dashboard surfaces.
The platform also supports specialised analytics built on the same foundation, for example, a Private Pricing Agreement (PPA) value tracker that applies a client’s negotiated discount rates across their consumption to show exactly how much value their enterprise agreement is delivering. New analytics like this can be built on top of the same data layer, which makes the second one significantly faster to build than the first.
Adding a new cost platform, or onboarding a new client, is a configuration exercise rather than a development one. As the FinOps tooling landscape evolves and new providers emerge, the platform can absorb them without re-architecture.
Built with the right engineering discipline
The Engine’s backend is built in Python, designed around a small, deliberate set of well-chosen libraries. The codebase is intentionally lean, clean Python that any engineer on Cloudec’s team can read, extend, and maintain, rather than a sprawl of dependencies that ages badly. The data layer, the transformation logic, and the integrations with each cost platform are all structured so that change is contained: a new cost provider, a new analytic, or a new report format can be added without unpicking what’s already there.
Supporting capabilities, integrated into the same platform
The CFM Cloud FinOps Maturity assessment, productised as a guided in-app experience covering Measurement & Accountability, Cost Optimisation, Planning & Forecasting, and Cloud Financial Operations. Each capability presents the maturity criteria from level 1 through level 5, with structured note capture and progress tracking, replacing the spreadsheets and Word documents this used to live in with a consistent, comparable artefact per client.
Cloudability business mappings, managed with engineering discipline. From the portal, a consultant can view and edit the mapping rules that translate raw cloud spend into business-meaningful dimensions. Behind the scenes, changes are deployed through a Plan → Apply → Discard workflow with proper review and rollback, giving the team infrastructure-as-code-grade control over what would otherwise be ad-hoc UI clicks. Backup and restore is built in.
Proactive cost alerting via Slack and JSM. Scheduled jobs run on configurable cadences and dispatch cost insights into the channels the team already lives in, daily account-level alerts, monthly summaries, business-mapping anomaly notifications. The team finds out about the things that matter before clients do, which is the entire premise of a managed FinOps service.
The Outcome
A reporting experience that answers the question. Cloudec’s consultants open the dashboard and see the financial picture immediately, invoice, amortised, run rate, credits, deltas, forecast, without assembling any of it. The thinking starts where the data work used to start.
Plug-and-play support for any cost platform. Whatever combination of platforms a client uses, the Engine ingests and reconciles it consistently. Adding a new platform is contained work, not re-architecture.
Specialised analytics built on the same foundation. PPA value tracking, business-mapping cost breakdowns, anomaly detection, all share the same data layer, which compounds the value of the platform over time.
The CFM assessment, delivered consistently and at scale. Cloudec’s flagship FinOps Maturity engagement is now backed by a proper tool, guided, structured, comparable across clients and time.
Cloudability mappings managed with discipline. Plan-and-apply, change review, rollback. The team moves faster on mapping changes while taking on less risk.
Proactive alerting that delivers on the MFSP promise. Cost intelligence reaches the team through the channels they actually use, shifting the operating posture from reactive to proactive.
A platform Cloudec owns and extends. The Engine, its data pipelines, its dashboards, and its supporting tools are all Cloudec’s. The platform grows with the business.
Why It Mattered
Managed FinOps as a service category lives or dies on consultant leverage. If your experts are spending half their day collating cost data into something legible, you don’t have a managed service, you have a labour-intensive consultancy with a subscription model.
The Engine flips that ratio. Cost data arrives reconciled into the views that matter. Anomalies surface in Slack before they surface on a client’s invoice. Mappings deploy through proper workflows. Assessments run cleanly. The work Cloudec’s team does is the FinOps work itself, the analysis, the recommendations, the strategic guidance, not the rummaging around to set it up.
That’s what makes the platform commercially meaningful. It’s the technology layer that allows Cloudec to deliver MFSP across a growing portfolio of clients without the model breaking down on the mechanics.
The Results
- Rich cost reporting dashboards across invoice, amortised, and run rate views.
- Plug-and-play support for any combination of cost platforms.
- Productised CFM Cloud FinOps Maturity assessment, delivered consistently.
- Cloudability business mappings managed with engineering-grade discipline.
- Proactive cost alerting integrated into Slack and Jira Service Management.
- A platform Cloudec owns, extends, and scales with the business.
