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29% of cloud spend could still be wasted.

But leading teams in 2026 are shifting focus. They’re governing AI, optimizing SaaS, and proving measurable ROI to the business.

The 15th State of the Cloud report, based on responses from cloud decision-makers worldwide, reveals both the persistent challenges and what top-performing teams are doing differently:

✓ Where AI costs are spiraling and how to govern them
✓ Why SaaS spend is rising 15% and how to optimize it
✓ How FinOps teams are evolving from cost control to technology value leadership
✓ Benchmarks separating reactive teams from strategic operators

For FinOps practitioners and cloud leaders, this report provides the data needed to influence priorities, build alignment, and forecast with confidence.

Download the 15th annual State of the Cloud: 15 years of intelligence, one undeniable shift.

AWS has introduced a new feature for AWS Billing and Cost Management Dashboards that automates the delivery of cost reports via email

The feature is available at no extra cost (currently launched in the US East region) and can be configured in minutes via the AWS Console or automated through the API for infrastructure-as-code environments.

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Brought by CloudZero Cloud Cost Playbook

AWS Cost Explorer now integrates Amazon Q for natural-language queries, allowing teams to generate cost visualizations and insights using plain English.

Amazon S3 Files (GA) enables high-performance file system access to S3 buckets, reducing storage and egress costs by eliminating the need for duplicate datasets.

OpenSearch Service added Graviton4-based i8ge instances, delivering superior price-performance for storage-heavy search and analytics workloads.

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No Updates this Week :(

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Microsoft Fabric introduced a new savings plan for databases, offering up to 35% discounts compared to pay-as-you-go rates.

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Standard cloud optimizations: reserved instances and basic rightsizing, are no longer enough. With the rapid rise of AI infrastructure and GPUs, cloud spend is outpacing traditional playbooks.

Join us to discover how leading teams are moving from reaction to prevention. Here’s our agenda:

11:00 AM | Welcome: Five Numbers That Don‘t Lie About Cloud & AI in 2026

11:10 AM | The Chain of Intent: Top–Down FinOps in an AI–Driven Cloud | Frank Contrepois

11:25 AM | Cloud & AI Governance: Reality Check and the Road Ahead | Brent Eubanks (Wayfair), Lindbergh Matillano (Avalara), Victoria Levy (SailPoint).

12:00 PM | GPUs Don‘t Drift, They Burn: Optimization in Practice | Speaker to be announced

12:15 PM | Not All AI Is Equal: Governing Foundation and Custom Models in the Cloud

12:30 PM | From Rules to Reasoning: The Agentic Future of FinOps Governance | Adam Richter (AWS) and Sonny Shi

12:50 PM | Closing Remarks

📅​ Date: April 16th
🕗​ Time: 11:00 AM EST / 17:00 CEST
📍 Online

We talk with Ben de Mora and discover how to use business context and internal marketing to drive real FinOps adoption. Learn how to apply a value-driven cloud strategy by moving beyond raw data and adding human and business context.

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By default, traffic in Amazon EKS is zone-agnostic. In a 3 Availability Zone (AZ) cluster, 67% of traffic unnecessarily crosses AZ boundaries, costing $0.02/GB (round trip). At a scale of 50 TB/month, this results in over $300/month in avoidable spend.

The definitive solution in Kubernetes 1.35 is adding trafficDistribution: PreferSameZone to your Service specifications. This single line of code eliminates 100% of cross-AZ traffic by prioritizing local endpoints while maintaining resilience through an automatic fallback to other zones if the local one fails.

Real-world benchmarks prove that this adjustment does more than just zero out variable network charges; it reduces average latency from 2.4ms to 1.8ms and guarantees zero errors during pod churn and deployments.

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Managing data center costs within a FinOps framework is essential to bridging the visibility gap between fixed on-premises hardware and variable cloud spend. FinOps Foundation whitepaper shows us how.

Since data center costs are often siloed and rigid, the most effective strategy is to build internal rate cards that translate physical infrastructure into cloud-like units, such as cost per vCPU-hour. This provides engineering teams with a stable planning baseline while allowing the organization to track idle capacity separately from consumption.

To drive successful adoption, organizations should prioritize showback to build awareness before enforcing chargeback, while partnering closely with Finance to prevent double bubble costs, where cloud spending grows without the corresponding retirement of legacy hardware.

Implementing the FOCUS standard acts as the critical technical translation layer, enabling data center, SaaS, and cloud metrics to coexist in unified dashboards.

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If your system is built to survive random hardware failures, it is already overqualified to handle a Spot interruption that gives you a polite two-minute head start. Key takeaways for you:

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The job market is hungry for certified professionals who can prove results. Don't let your company's budget leak due to a lack of specialization.

Use code: FINOPSWEEKLY to get an instant 20% discount on the most prestigious certification bundles:

If you want to be in the room where the big decisions are made, you need to be at FinOps X. We’ve secured preferred access for our community:

Cloud Optimization & FinOps | Sailpoint

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