By Cloud budgets have grown large enough to affect whether a business can scale profitably, but most organizations are still managing spend through dashboards rather than through accountability structures tied to business outcomes. AI adoption is accelerating consumption faster than governance frameworks have matured, leaving finance and engineering leadership exposed to cost structures they do not fully control.
In this interview on TFiR, Peter Maloney, CFO and COO at Azul, walks through the two-stage cloud cost framework that separates organizations managing cloud strategically from those reacting to invoices.
Guest: Peter Maloney, CFO and COO at Azul
Show: TFiR
Here is what every CFO, FinOps lead, and platform engineering leader needs to know.
Technical Deep Dive
Q: What conversation should CFOs be having with their CTO about cloud costs right now?
Peter Maloney, CFO and COO at Azul, argues that most organizations have begun using tools to gain visibility into cloud spend, but visibility alone is not enough. The critical missing element is accountability tied to specific projects and teams, not just aggregate spend categories. Maloney describes how Azul assigns ownership of the cloud bill down to every individual project and reviews that data on a weekly basis.
“There needs to be accountability. We literally take our cloud bill and we are able to identify down to every single project who’s responsible, and we manage it very actively.” — Peter Maloney, CFO and COO, Azul
Q: What is Stage 1 in cloud cost management and what does it actually require?
Stage 1 is the foundation: achieving full visibility and accountability across every project consuming cloud resources, and connecting that spend to the business outcomes it is meant to support. Maloney identifies three outcome categories to map against spend: customer outcomes, product outcomes, and development outcomes. Once the mapping exists, organizations can take fast action on either the consumption side or the commercial side, including negotiating better deals with cloud providers.
“If you start identifying what the big outcomes are and you know where you’re spending, you can take quick actions on the consumption side or with partners on the commercial side to negotiate better deals.” — Peter Maloney, CFO and COO, Azul
Q: What is Stage 2 in cloud cost management and how does it differ from Stage 1?
Stage 2 moves beyond identification into application-level optimization. After an organization knows which specific applications and products are driving cloud consumption, it can implement tools that make those applications more compute-efficient. Maloney uses Azul as the example: deploying Azul on high-consumption Java applications reduces the cloud resources those applications require, producing direct cost savings rather than just better reporting.
“You can focus on those applications and actually implement something like Azul that will make those applications much more productive.” — Peter Maloney, CFO and COO, Azul
Q: Why is AI accelerating the urgency for CFOs to address cloud cost now?
AI workloads are materially increasing cloud consumption, forcing CFOs to engage with cloud cost strategy earlier than they may have planned. Maloney notes that CFOs move fast when something becomes material enough to affect their ability to scale the business profitably, and cloud spend has crossed that threshold. The arrival of AI is compressing the timeline: organizations that have not yet moved from Stage 1 to Stage 2 are now at a competitive disadvantage.
“AI is starting to drive people to have to think about cloud even more, or maybe even before they wanted to. Companies and CFOs are going to have to go from stage one to stage two fast to remain competitive and have the right business model for the future.” — Peter Maloney, CFO and COO, Azul
Q: How do CFOs decide when cloud cost has become a priority worth acting on?
Maloney frames the CFO decision threshold in terms of profitable scaling. Finance leaders allocate attention to costs that are large enough to affect the economics of growth. Until cloud spend reached that materiality threshold for most businesses, it did not command CFO-level urgency. That has now changed, and Maloney observes that the shift is happening quickly across the market.
“CFOs are always going to go to the concept of scaling their businesses profitably. When something becomes material and it can make a difference for the ability to scale, their attention will go to it right away.” — Peter Maloney, CFO and COO, Azul
Resources and Documentation
- Azul, Java runtime platform engineered for cloud cost reduction and application performance optimization
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👇 Click to Read Full Raw Transcript
Swapnil Bhartiya: If you have a meeting with a CFO who is going to meet his team, his CTOs next week to talk about cloud cost, what’s the conversation? You know, they are probably not having because they have never had, but they should have. What would be your advice to that CFO?
Peter Maloney: I think they probably have started to use tools to get visibility and identify what’s happening. But I would say number one, there needs to be accountability. And we here at Azul, we literally take our cloud bill and we are able to identify down to every single project who’s responsible and we manage it very actively. We’re looking at reporting weekly, et cetera. So it’s important to get down to sort of full knowledge and visibility and accountability. I think secondly though, and I mentioned it earlier, is understanding what are the big outcomes that you want? Are they customer related outcomes, are they product related outcomes, are they development related outcomes? And if you start identifying that and you know where you’re spending, you can take quick actions on the consumption side or with partners on the commercial side to negotiate actually better deals. Right? Those are, that’s stage one, but stage two, that’s really identifying where are you consuming the cloud, what products, what applications in your business. And you can focus on those applications and actually implement something like Azul that will make those applications much more productive. And so stage one is identifying and understanding where you’re spending, what you expect your outcomes to be and then looking at tools that can help you actually solve and take action rather than just identifying. I think, and you can see it in the results, things are happening fast here. Right. And I think as you said, AI is starting to drive people to have to think about cloud even more or maybe even before they wanted to. Right. And so there’s a learning curve. CFOs are always going to go to the concept of scaling their businesses profitably. So when something becomes material and it can make a difference for the ability to scale, CFOs, their attention will go to it right away. Right. And so until recently we haven’t seen that. Now we’re seeing it and it’s happening very fast. And I think that model of, as I said, Stage 1 versus Stage 2 is important because companies and CFOs are going to have to go from stage one to stage two fast to remain competitive and have the right business model for the future.
