Hey! I’m Alexa. Over the past few years, I’ve gone from the classroom to board rooms, helping teams understand the story behind their cloud spend and what to do with it.

I spent 5 years teaching in public schools before I ever touched cloud bills. Seems like a wild pivot, but a lot of what I learned in the classroom is exactly what helps me manage cloud spend at scale now.

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From Classroom to Cloud

FinOps drops you right in the middle of engineering, finance, and the business. Everyone comes in with their own context, incentives, and definition of good. The classroom prepared me for that. No two students were the same. If I wanted a lesson to land, I had to adjust the language and the why so it actually met them where they were.

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One example that still sticks with me: I would roll out the exact same project to 30 students and watch it land 30 different ways. Some kids needed the grade motivation. Some needed to see how it connected to real life. Others just wanted something they were proud to show someone at home.

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That is exactly what driving optimization feels like in FinOps. The recommendation might be the same, but the story cannot be. Being intentional about how you frame the pitch and what data you bring for this team in this moment is how FinOps actually moves anything.

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And somewhere along the way, I learned a bigger truth: the bill is not the real problem. Inefficiency is. Most of the waste that actually matters does not show up in dashboards. It hides in behavior, drift, and old architectural decisions that keep running quietly in the background. Traditional tools surface symptoms. The deeper stuff only shows up when you look at usage continuously and in context.

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Community as the Throughline

The community surrounding FinOps is why I stayed. For me, cutting spend is just one piece of the framework. The power is in building spaces where people can learn from each other and move with the market together. That felt familiar to me. Building classroom culture was my favorite part of teaching. The more students felt like they could show up exactly as they were, the more willing they were to wrestle with hard, complex ideas.

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That is what I have found at PointFive too.

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Even though our roots stretch across different countries, teams, and backgrounds, we share the same belief: community is the connective tissue for growth, resiliency, and innovation.

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FinOps in Motion

Through the FinOps Foundation and other communities, I have met hundreds of practitioners and started to notice a pattern:

• FinOps practitioners care about value and impact, not just savings.
• FinOps is evolving from reporting on spend to shaping how teams architect, deploy, and run their workloads. 
• The biggest wins come when you stop doing one off cleanups and start building shared systems that keep your cloud healthy at scale.
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Now I am at PointFive in a role that sits right at the intersection of FinOps, community, and real world practice. This year, we launched the Cloud Efficiency Hub, where we are collecting what more than 100 practitioners have learned about running efficient cloud environments.

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The Hub lives inside a bigger idea we care about a lot: Cloud Efficiency Posture Management. In simple terms, CEPM is about keeping an eye on the health of your cloud all the time, not just reacting when the bill looks bad. It looks for the deeper inefficiencies that hide in normal usage and gives teams the context to fix them in the tools they already use. It is cloud efficiency as an ongoing practice, not a quarterly chore.

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In 2026, we are going to keep growing the Hub and shipping resources that help practitioners drive more value in their own orgs, like open source scripts to spot inefficiencies across large environments. And just as important, we will keep creating chances for practitioners to connect, build relationships, and learn from each other, because none of this works without the humans in the loop.

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