From IT Support to Enterprise Cloud Leader ft. Gerard Sanchez | Ep #77

What if the best FinOps practitioners are the ones who never set out to be FinOps practitioners at all?

In this episode of FinOps in Action, host Taylor Houck sits down with Gerard Sanchez, Head of Enterprise Platforms and Cloud Technology at Resolution Life, to unpack what it actually looks like to build a cloud engineering, DevOps, and FinOps practice from absolute zero at a company that was only six months old when he joined. Gerard brings a hardcore infrastructure and networking background to a discipline that too often gets siloed away from engineering, and the results speak for themselves.

Here’s what we talked about:

• Set up automated cost alerts and guardrails from the start. Getting notified about a surprise bill is useful, but building automations that throttle or shut down rogue functions before the cost spiral is where you really want to be.

• Tagging is non-negotiable. If you can't trace spend back to a specific application or team, you'll never have the visibility to make smart optimization decisions.

• Shift FinOps left into the architecture and design phase. Catching cost inefficiencies before they deploy is far more effective than trying to optimize them after the fact.

• Match your cloud services to the actual workload. Before defaulting to high-performance, high-cost infrastructure, pressure-test whether the use case actually demands it. A Toyota Corolla solution often performs just as well as a Bugatti for the average user.

• Keep humans in the loop as you adopt AI. Even as agentic systems get more capable, building strong permissioning, tagging, and auditability into your AI framework now will save you from costly and chaotic surprises later.

Chapters:

00:42 Meeting Gerard Sanchez

01:25 Building from Scratch

02:52 Fast and Good Over Cheap

05:22 The Wake Up Call

07:58 Crawl Walk Run Journey

10:08 Engineering Led FinOps

11:53 Right Sizing Use Cases

14:43 Shifting Left

16:13 AI and Automation

18:46 Agentic AI Architecture

22:12 Trust and Validation

23:45 Managing AI Costs

24:55 The Future of Business

30:31 Building the AI Foundation

32:50 Career Advice

36:58 Closing Thoughts

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Quote of the Show:

• "I think especially for production environments or environments that are super sensitive, there's always gonna be a human in the loop." — Gerard Sanchez

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerard-r-sanchez/
• Website: https://www.resolutionlife.com/

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