Inside Rabbit’s Strategy to Automate Cloud Cost Optimization for Engineering Teams with Balazs Molnar | Cloud Wars Live

Balazs Molnar, CEO and co-founder of Rabbit, chats with Kieron
Allen about the evolving challenges of cloud cost management and
how engineering teams have become central to tackling them. He
explains why traditional FinOps tools fall short, how Rabbit
dives below the surface to uncover hidden waste (especially in
platforms like BigQuery) and why automation is essential for real
savings.


Optimizing Cloud with Rabbit


The Big Themes:



Cloud Costs Take Center Stage: Companies are
no longer asking, "What can we build on the cloud?" They're now
asking, "Why is this so expensive?" Rabbit's origin stems from
this exact pivot: cloud costs spiraled out of control, catching
businesses off guard. Despite robust migration to cloud
environments like Google Cloud, companies found themselves
ill-equipped to understand the hidden inefficiencies causing
waste. Cloud spend can quickly balloon without the right
oversight.


The Cloud Buffet Problem: Balazs described
cloud computing like a buffet: Engineers can take whatever they
want, whenever they want. The cloud’s flexibility is its
strength but also its greatest risk. Unlike traditional on-prem
setups that required hardware purchases and physical limits,
cloud environments are boundless. Engineering teams now hold
the wheel, yet they’re typically not tasked to steer toward
efficiency. This creates what Molnar calls a "FinOps trap":
assuming finance can solve a problem that’s fundamentally
technical.


Why Optimization Matters Now: Cloud vendors
are still growing at impressive rates, but cracks are forming.
Some businesses are exiting the cloud, not because they dislike
the model — but because costs feel unmanageable. Molnar warns
that in most cases, this isn’t a cloud problem — it’s an
optimization problem. The promise of cloud was flexibility and
scalability. But without proper tools, it becomes unpredictably
expensive.



The Big Quote: "We all know the news that cloud vendors are
growing 30%+ on a year-over-year basis. But we also started to
see cracks in the system where companies are actually deciding to
move out of the cloud because it's too expensive to them. But the
reality [is] it might not have to be that expensive. It's just
not optimized."


More from Balazs Molnar and
Rabbit:


Connect with Balazs on LinkedIn and check out more about
Rabbit.

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