What does it take to unlock massive cost savings — without compromising performance or compliance? In this episode, host Thalia Elie sits down with Tyler Lynch, Field CTO at IBM supporting HashiCorp, to share stories of strategic savings, AI cost modeling, and why aligning FinOps to business value — not just uptime or savings — is the future. From time complexity to Terraform, Tyler breaks down why collaboration across teams beats hero engineering and how FinOps is a mindset, not just a method.
Key Takeaways
- Every 9 of availability comes with a cost – optimize for what the contract requires, not more
- Logs and storage are silent spend killers; challenge what’s kept, where, and why
- AI queries don’t just cost model tokens, they hit every part of your stack
- Process engineering is FinOps’ secret weapon
- Collaboration across teams beats hero engineering
About the guest
Tyler Lynch is a Field CTO at IBM supporting HashiCorp, helping large, regulated enterprises architect for scale, security, and cost efficiency. With experience at AWS as lead architect for public sector technologies, Tyler brings two decades of technical depth, including Terraform contributions and engineering for outcomes that matter — like 96% cost reductions and secure AI delivery.
