The "CFO-Approved" Deployment: Embedding FinOps into Your CI/CD Pipeline
The Friday Deploy, Monday Panic Picture this: You ship a new GenAI feature on Friday. Users hammer it all weekend. Product is thrilled. On Monday morning, Finance pings you: “Why did our cloud bill jump 300% in two days?” Nothing is “broken” in the usual sense: A dev quietly swapped Llama 8B → Llama 70B to squeeze out a few extra percentage points on accuracy. Or someone bumped the RAG context window from 3 chunks to 20 . Or an agent chain went from 1 LLM call to 3 per query . The feature works. The model is “better.” Economically? It’s a dumpster fire. Most teams still treat cost as a retrospective problem—something the FinOps team explains at the end of the month. If you’re serious about an AI governance framework, that’s too late. Cost has to move left, into the engineering workflow , right next to accuracy and reliability. This post shows how to use Databricks Asset Bundles + MLflow 3 to add a “cost gate” to your CI/CD pipeline, so expensive AI changes ar...