Jan 16
Loading video player...
FinOps is becoming an essential skill for platform engineers in 2026. This episode provides a complete guide to the skills, certifications, and tools you need to add cloud cost management to your platform engineering toolkit. With 76% of organizations increasing FinOps investment and platform teams owning 70%+ of cloud spending decisions, mastering FinOps can add 10-15% to your salary - or create a compound skill premium exceeding $175K. 📰 News Segment (0:00) • GPG.fail - 14 critical GnuPG vulnerabilities discovered • MongoBleed CVE-2025-14847 - patch MongoDB immediately • The Dangers of SSL Certificates - catastrophic failure analysis • Google Multi-Cluster Orchestrator - cross-region K8s (KubeCon 2025) 📊 Topics Covered: • Why FinOps matters for platform engineers (3:00) • FinOps salary benchmarks 2026 (5:00) • Three-tier skill progression (7:00) • Certification roadmap for platform engineers (10:00) • Tools deep dive: OpenCost, Kubecost, FOCUS (12:00) • Practical recommendations by experience level (14:00) 💰 Salary Benchmarks: • FinOps Engineer: $101K average, $175K+ top earners • Senior FinOps Engineer: $150K average, $250K+ top earners • Platform Engineering + FinOps: $175K+ compound premium 🎯 Key Certifications: • FinOps Certified Practitioner ($300) - start here • FinOps for Containers (coming 2026) • FinOps for AI (March 2026, $500) • FinOps Certified Platform Engineer (FCPE) 🔧 Essential Tools: • OpenCost - CNCF sandbox project, free • Kubecost - enterprise features • FOCUS v1.3 - standard billing format • ScaleOps/nOps - automated optimization 🔗 Resources: • Episode page: https://platformengineering.org/podcasts/00073-finops-2026-platform-engineers-guide • FinOps Foundation: https://finops.org • OpenCost: https://opencost.io • FOCUS Specification: https://focus.finops.org 📺 Related Episodes: • #072: Platform Engineering Salary Report 2026 • #066: CNPE Certification Study Guide • #044: Platform Engineering Certification Tier List #FinOps #PlatformEngineering #CloudCost #Kubernetes #DevOps #CloudNative #CNCF #OpenCost #Kubecost #CareerAdvice #TechSalary