Published: 1st Dec 2025
Modern cloud architecture lives or dies on cost visibility. For Denis Parker, Services Architecture Manager at HEAnet, FinOps is not an afterthought. It is part of the blueprint from day one.
We spoke with Denis about how his capstone project on the MSc in Software Solutions Architecture in 2025 investigated how FinOps techniques can optimise spend in AWS, while improving collaboration between engineering, finance, and product teams.
What began as a pursuit of academic mastery quickly turned into a mission driven by a startling financial revelation.
TLDR; the next wave of challenging, high-impact architecture problems involves bridging the financial and engineering worlds. The MSc in Software Solutions Architecture provided the foundation not just to understand cloud infrastructure, but to financially optimise it and drive multi-billion dollar strategic change.
The Industry Problem FinOps Is Built To Solve
The stakes are not small. Cloud is consuming a bigger slice of the IT budget. Denis cites market estimates that cloud spend is surging and that a meaningful share is wasted, which implies hundreds of billions of dollars of non-value activity if left unchecked.
The shocking reality? Gartner projects worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services will total $723.4 billion in 2025. Yet, roughly a quarter of that spend delivers limited value due to idle or misallocated resources (source: SoftwareOne). Waste being classified as any activity or process that does not add value from the customer’s perspective. This colossal waste, amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars, formed the core problem Denis set out to solve.
Denis saw the same barrier appear again and again. Technologists were captivated by the latest service. Finance struggled to get robust business cases and cost transparency. He also found surprisingly little academic focus on how architectural choices drive cost.
This disconnect meant that cost management was often treated as an afterthought, rather than a foundational design requirement.
“From my experience in Industry I have regularly seen a gap in understanding between technologists and financial professionals,” says Denis, adding “Technical people were likely to say ‘that’s just tagging’ and ignore it.”
From Theory To Instrumented AWS
Denis chose to focus his Capstone project on FinOps (Financial Operations), a methodology defined by its attempt to bring the areas of finance and engineering together using a collaborative approach, similar to DevOps.
To keep the scope actionable, Denis centred the study on deployment rather than lifecycle analysis, where most cost-shaping choices are made. He set three research questions.
- What is the current level of FinOps knowledge in the industry?
- How could a standard deployment be instrumented to provide FinOps metrics?
- How would an organisation benefit from implementing FinOps practices?
He built and instrumented a reference environment in AWS, applying a pragmatic tagging strategy and surfacing cost data through CloudWatch and billing sources.
This practical work revealed a key architectural insight for fellow developers: “The deployment of tags to resources for a simple case is extremely easy however scaling this approach to a larger environment such as a three-tier environment which had more than 25 resources would be complex and require careful planning and preferably automation.”
A New Strategic Mandate for Cloud Architects
The research surfaced three cross-cutting gaps.
- Many teams lack cloud optimisation knowledge
- In-house expertise is thin
- Cross-department collaboration is inconsistent
Denis’s conclusion is direct.
“Security is Job 0, FinOps is Job 0.5,” says Denis, referencing the commonly used phrase, arguing that cost and security are both foundational to responsible architecture. Denis adds that “before any code or design is created a coherent security and cost architecture should be established.”
FinOps provides a common language and framework for engineering and finance, and it belongs in design reviews rather than post-deployment clean-up. It provides the technology and business framework required to identify, manage, and control costs, encouraging their inclusion during the design stages.
Denis’s governance conclusion empowers developers while maintaining control: Strategy decisions should be moved to a central authority (such as a Cloud Centre of Excellence), but local decision making should be kept as close to the developer as possible.
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Impact For Engineering, Finance, And Product
The immediate win is surfacing costs that were previously hidden in coarse billing. With granular tagging and standard metrics, product and finance can see which features or environments drive spend, then shape roadmaps and guardrails accordingly. Denis positions FinOps as an industry standard that reduces friction between roles.
The practical message to leaders is simple. Put cost objectives next to performance and reliability. Instrument early. Automate tagging and show-back. Then review the data in the same cadence as security and SLOs.
Why FinOps Also Supports Sustainability
Denis links cost efficiency to environmental goals in a clear way. Wasted or misallocated cloud costs map to unnecessary data centre power use. As hyperscale facilities push toward gigawatt levels, every idle resource matters. He argues for a two-way approach as AI loads rise.
- FinOps for AI, where prompts and workflows have reliable cost estimates.
- AI for FinOps, where AI interrogates complex billing to uncover new optimisation opportunities.
The first requires rigorous tagging and cost models. The second depends on clean, well-structured data. Both start at design time.
Architecture in Ireland With A Broader Lens
The Master’s in Software Solutions Architecture sharpened Denis’s ability to engage peers across technology, policy, strategy, and people functions. “The programme provided tools and language that allowed me to create good business relationships,” he explains.
He expects his solution designs to benefit from stronger standardisation and best practices, and he has already introduced FinOps thinking to his management team at HEAnet as part of ongoing knowledge sharing.
Denis’s project shows how the MSc in Software Solutions Architecture moves beyond diagrams and into operational reality. It demonstrates how to translate architectural goals into measurable cost outcomes, and how to create alignment between engineers and finance from the first sprint.
About Denis Parker
Denis Parker is Services Architecture Manager at HEAnet in Ireland, where he leads a team of architects and QA professionals. His experience spans senior cloud architecture and product roles, with a career built across infrastructure, private and public cloud, and software delivery leadership. He completed the MSc in Software Solutions Architecture in 2025.
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