What is FinOps on Azure and how do you implement cost governance?

FinOps (Cloud Financial Operations) is the practice of managing cloud spend with shared accountability between engineering, finance, and business. Azure implementation: Azure Cost Management + Billing: analyze spending by resource, resource group, subscription, or tag. Set budgets with alert thresholds. Use Cost Analysis to identify waste. Tagging strategy: enforce tags (environment, project, owner, cost-center) via Azure Policy to enable cost allocation. Azure Advisor: recommendations for underutilized VMs, reserved instance opportunities, and idle resources. Reservations and Savings Plans: commit to predictable workloads for 40–70% savings. Auto-shutdown for dev/test VMs. Management Groups for hierarchical budget assignment. Showback/chargeback: report cost per team or product line. A mature FinOps practice requires both technical tools and organizational processes.