Customer Stories
Taking the Turbulence Out of Cloud Spend
How smarter FinOps practices helped Luxair gain clear skies over its cloud costs.
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Luxembourg's Flag Carrier
Tracing its roots back to Luxembourg Airlines (founded in 1948), Luxair launched its first flights in 1963. Today, it is a state-owned airline headquartered in Munsbach, serving as Luxembourg’s official flag carrier. Luxair operates passenger and cargo services across Europe, the Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Middle East.
At a Glance
Why
Control and manage Azure cloud spending
What
FinOps report with cost management guidance
How
Cloud and cost assessment by Xebia
Understanding Cloud Costs
As Luxair migrated to Microsoft Azure, the finance team noticed a steady increase in monthly cloud expenses. Yet, the technical team could not explain the rising costs or predict where they would stabilize. This growing uncertainty raised concerns at the executive level, especially for the CFO. Key questions emerged:
- Where are these costs coming from?
- Who or what is driving them?
- How can we allocate them accurately?
- And what will the final cost picture look like once we’re fully in production?
To uncover the answers, Luxair turned to Xebia.
Cloud Assessment
Xebia conducted a cloud cost assessment to evaluate the efficiency of Luxair’s setup and gain the financial insight needed for better forecasting and accountability. Over several days, Xebia interviewed stakeholders, including technical teams, architects, and finance professionals, and reviewed Luxair's cloud architecture.
Gill Cleeren, CTO Xebia Microsoft Services Belgium, adds: "Our main focus was to understand the company’s cloud costs. To do so, we needed to assess if the resource types aligned with Luxair's goals. For example, we checked if scaling, configurations, downtimes, and alerts were optimized to ensure operational efficiency and avoid overspending."
Beyond The Architecture
The assessment confirmed that Luxair’s cloud cost structure was fundamentally sound, but it also highlighted a key opportunity: improving predictability and transparency across the organization. Cleeren explains that “Luxair’s technical setup was in good shape, which made their challenges even more interesting. If the architecture is solid but there are still unanswered questions about costs, then the real issue isn’t technical, it’s organizational. The solution lies in how information flows and decisions are made.”
In this case, Luxair's cloud cost data was concentrated within the technical team, leaving finance and business stakeholders without the necessary visibility. This made it hard to forecast spending, explain usage spikes, or make data-driven decisions.
Cleeren, “The challenge wasn’t just managing the cloud but aligning teams around a shared understanding of its financial impact.”
FinOps
To address this, Xebia introduced a FinOps framework to help structure the organization for more efficient cloud financial management.
Cleeren, "We recommended setting up dedicated roles or organizing regular monthly meetings with stakeholders to align on goals. Plus, we provided Luxair with a FinOps maturity score and actionable recommendations to take their cloud financial processes to the next level, making costs more predictable and transparent." Finally, Xebia highlighted the importance of measuring cloud unit costs, understanding costs per service and comparing them against the value generated.
Cleeren, "We often see costs rising, but then at the same time, more value is being generated. Your invoice alone doesn’t capture the full picture. And when value grows faster than cost, the cloud spend becomes easier to manage and justify."
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