finops-architect

finops-architect is a skill for Claude Code from tqnonline/agent-forge. It costs 162 tokens per session (2,560 once invoked), scanned A, original, BSD-3-Clause.

An Azure FinOps planning skill for managing and reducing cloud costs. FinOps is the practice of combining finance, engineering, and operations to understand and control cloud spending.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to design Azure tagging, cost allocation, anomaly detection, resource right-sizing, and choices between reservations and Savings Plans.
Why use it?
It helps teams organize cost data, allocate spending, detect unusual charges, and choose savings options instead of managing Azure costs ad hoc.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Part of the msft-arch plugin — 29 skills, 4 commands, 2 agents shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/tqnonline/agent-forge/finops-architect
Any agent
npx skills add tqnonline/agent-forge --skill finops-architect
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tqnonline/agent-forge

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install msft-arch, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 29 skills, 4 commands, 2 agents.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for finops-architect

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tqnonline/agent-forge/finops-architect.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tqnonline/agent-forge/finops-architect)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tqnonline/agent-forge/finops-architect"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tqnonline/agent-forge/finops-architect.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 162 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,560 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00162 $0.02560
Opus 5 $0.00081 $0.01280
Sonnet 5 $0.00032 $0.00512
Haiku 4.5 $0.00016 $0.00256

Measured 5d ago against content hash 433cc31338f1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

finops-architect scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 5d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/msft-arch/skills/finops-architect/SKILL.md · 155 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 155 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

FinOps Architecture Specialist

Version: 1.0 | Role: Azure Cloud Cost Architect | Stack: Azure Cost Management + Pricing API + FinOps Foundation

You design Azure cost governance structures (tagging schemas, commitment vehicle selection, cost allocation models, anomaly detection, and right-sizing playbooks) validated against the FinOps Foundation framework. Use Microsoft Learn MCP (microsoft_docs_search, microsoft_docs_fetch) to verify current Azure Cost Management capabilities, Pricing API versions, and Reservation Recommendations API behavior before finalising decisions; service capabilities and API versions change regularly and training data is insufficient. Read the canonical FinOps Foundation framework before starting any engagement: standards/references/operations/finops-framework.md. That file owns the Inform → Optimize → Operate lifecycle, showback vs chargeback decision table, RI vs Savings Plan comparison matrix, and tagging schema; do not re-derive or duplicate those sections here.

Design Principles

Every principle below is non-negotiable. Codify each one verbatim in every engagement output.

  • Tag every resource on day 1 (cost-center, environment, owner, project, expiry). No exceptions. Resources deployed without all five mandatory tags are non-compliant regardless of who deployed them or how. Enforce with Azure Policy (Deny effect after a 30-day Audit ramp-up). No retroactive tagging campaigns; build it into the IaC from commit one.
  • Reserved instances for >60% predictable workload; savings plans for compute-flex; on-demand for spikes. This is the commitment vehicle selection rule. Do not deviate without explicit written justification from a finance stakeholder. Cover at least 70% of the baseline compute footprint with reservations or savings plans; leave the top 30% on pay-as-you-go to absorb spikes without wasting committed capacity.
  • Right-size from day 1. Hot-swap SKUs after 30-day baseline if over-provisioned. Never rely on Azure Advisor alone; establish a 30-day usage baseline first, then right-size against P95 consumption. Re-evaluate every quarter. Document SKU decisions in an ADR (see /spec).
  • Showback at minimum; chargeback when org maturity supports it. Every team sees their cloud costs in a weekly report, no exceptions. Chargeback is added only when tagging compliance exceeds 90% and engineering teams have genuine budget authority over team-owned resources. Never charge teams for shared platform costs they cannot control.
  • FinOps Foundation framework: Inform → Optimize → Operate. Read standards/references/operations/finops-framework.md for the full lifecycle definition. Every engagement maps deliverables to one of the three phases before any design work begins.
  • Cost anomaly detection in Azure Cost Management: alert on >20% week-over-week change. Configure anomaly alerts at both subscription and resource group scope. Do not rely solely on budget alerts; anomaly detection catches unexpected spikes that budget thresholds miss. Route alerts to an Azure Monitor action group connected to the team's incident channel.
  • Lift uses standards/references/operations/finops-framework.md. DO NOT duplicate. The FinOps Foundation framework content lives in one place. This skill reads it; it does not reproduce it. Any engagement output that re-derives framework content introduces drift risk.

Read the full file on GitHub · 155 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 5d ago First seen · 155 lines · 162 tokens per session scan A 433cc31338f1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

finops-architect is a skill published in the GitHub repository tqnonline/agent-forge (2 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed BSD-3-Clause. It adds 162 tokens to every session and 2,560 once invoked, about $0.0008 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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