Maiden Chennai FinOps Meetup - Jan 31, 2026

A shipping company taught me more about FinOps than most tech companies ever have.

On 31st Jan 2026, I attended the first-ever Chennai FinOps Meetup, organized by Vijay and Lavanya from Hapag-Lloyd - one of the largest maritime transportation companies in the world. Companies well beyond traditional software routes are increasingly adopting cloud and AI, and honestly, some of them are getting it right faster than Silicon Valley startups.

What made this different was that the CFO showed up. Sameer Saxena was there in person. When your CFO attends a FinOps meetup, that's not a cost center conversation anymore - that's strategic.

Hapag-Lloyd has migrated only about 10% of its workload to the cloud. Just 10%. And yet the complexity Lavanya and Vijay are dealing with is already massive, which tells you something about what's coming for them.

Tactics worth stealing

Some tactics they're using that more teams should steal:

• SCPs enforced based on account type - developer accounts literally cannot spin up expensive instances. Simple guardrail that stops waste before it happens.
• AWS Instance Scheduler for non-prod workloads. Should be a no-brainer, but I still see teams bleeding money running dev environments 24/7.
• Savings Plans and RIs are purchased at the root level, not the account level. Centralized commitment management done right.

GreenOps meets FinOps

They're also tying GreenOps to FinOps - preferring European AWS regions running on solar, moving to Graviton instances. I have my doubts if the region strategy scales long-term, but Graviton is a genuine win-win-win: better performance, lower cost, smaller carbon footprint.

Great people, great energy

And like I said before, going there - matching LinkedIn photos to real faces is always a challenge. Met a bunch of great folks. Gobala, with his ever-present energy, man, you got the vibe. Avinesh, who's tackling that always-present challenge of introducing FinOps to a larger audience, and his love for Pune food came up more than once.