Cloud Savings != Better Business
Victor Garcia
May 11, 2025
FinOps
From Cost Savings to Innovation
Many companies think they're doing well by cutting cloud costs, but they might be holding back their growth without knowing it. FinOps often focuses too much on saving money instead of helping companies grow. Here's what's going wrong, companies are:
Reducing costs without improving their products
Focusing on watching spending instead of making decisions
Getting stuck in long-term commitments that limit flexibility
Chris offers a 4-week plan to fix this:
Week 1: Change how you talk about savings - call them "innovation capital" instead
Week 2: Take 10-20% of your saved money and put it into future-focused projects
Week 3: Look at your long-term commitments and check if they still make sense
Week 4: Get your teams together to find what's really slowing down progress
A key test is asking yourself: "Are we just getting cheaper, or are we actually getting better?" It's not enough to save money - you need to use those savings to make your company stronger and faster.
Together with Flexera
The Cloud+ Era Demands More — Can FinOps Deliver?
From GenAI to carbon tracking to MSP-led environments, cloud operations are becoming increasingly complex — and FinOps is rising to meet the challenge.
According to Flexera’s 14th annual State of the Cloud Report, built on insights from 750+ global IT leaders, FinOps is evolving into the connective tissue of cloud strategy — moving beyond a cost function to become a core driver of cloud efficiency, sustainability, and innovation.
And it’s working: even as 84% of organizations struggle with cloud spend, FinOps teams are helping achieve measurable waste reductions. Crucially, FinOps keeps spending in check as adoption expands across AI, sustainability, and third-party services. Yet a lack of support, visibility gaps, and fragmented ownership still hold teams back, potentially overstretching their capacity and undermining results.
Download the 2025 State of the Cloud Report — and see how FinOps leaders are staying in control as the cloud frontier expands.
SNOWFLAKE
Optimize Snowflake Warehouses for Cost Efficiency
This article explains how to make better use of Snowflake data warehouses and save money while doing it. Five key ways to check if your Snowflake setup is working well:
Looking at overall warehouse costs: Tracks how many queries run, measures data usage and shows how much time is wasted
Checking costs for each warehouse: Shows which warehouses use more resources
Finding ways to combine warehouses: Identifies warehouses that aren't being used much. Suggests which ones can be merged together
Spotting unused warehouses: Finds warehouses running below 30% capacity
Finding unused storage space: Looks for old or duplicate data taking up space
The article provides specific database queries to help teams check these areas.
FINOPS EVENTS
FinOps Weekly 1st Anniversary Giveaway
It’s our 1st Anniversary! A huge thank you for being part of the FinOps Weekly family this past year.
To celebrate this milestone and show our appreciation, we’ve partnered with our friends at Flexera to give away three exclusive licenses for the highly-rated Mastering FinOps course!
What it is: A hands-on, live course designed to make you a top-tier FinOps practitioner.
What will you learn in this course? In this course, you’ll master the fundamentals of Naming Conventions and Tagging within a FinOps strategy to better manage and allocate cloud costs across AWS, GCP, Azure, and Kubernetes.
Ends May 15th, 2025 at 23:00 (CEST). Less than a week left!
MICROSOFT
Transition from EA to MCA Using FinOps Toolkit
Microsoft is making changes to how companies manage their cloud costs by moving from Enterprise Agreement (EA) to Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA). To have a better transition, the Microsoft FinOps toolkit helps companies during this change in three main ways:
It connects old and new data using something called FOCUS, which makes all cost information look the same and easy to understand.
It works with Power BI to show costs from both old and new systems in one place.
It offers "FinOps hubs" for bigger companies spending over $100,000.
All these tools use open-source standards, so companies can keep track of their spending history while getting better features for managing their cloud costs.
AWS
AWS Budgets Adds Advanced Cost Tracking Features
AWS has added new features to their Budgets tool to help companies track their cloud spending more accurately. The main updates include:
The ability to track costs after discounts are applied, giving a more true picture of what you're actually spending. You can now leave out specific items when making budgets, like certain services or accounts you don't want to count. There's better control over what types of charges to include or exclude in your calculations.
To use these new features, you'll need special permissions in your AWS account. Once you have those, you can create new budgets through the AWS console or update existing ones. For companies already using AWS Budgets, nothing will break.
📺️ PODCAST
How to Make Engineers Apply FinOps
Get ready for an amazing episode of the FinOps Weekly Podcast as another expert drops their incredible insights!
What role does engineering have in FinOps? We explore this with Jeremy Chaplin, focusing on team collaboration, cost-reduction strategies, and the necessity of a shared language.
🎖️ MENTION OF HONOUR
Govern Your Storage Costs: Strategy & Automation
Great two article series by Oliver Assad tackling storage costs. They make up a big part of cloud bills, yet many companies don't plan how to manage these costs well. There are three main types of storage in the cloud: Object Storage, Block Storage and Cache Storage. When it comes to saving copies of your data, you have two choices:
Snapshots: Takes a picture of your data at one moment. Only saves what changed since last time. Uses less space overall
Backups: Makes complete copies of your data. Keeps multiple full copies. Uses more space but provides better protection
A real example shows the difference. For a 100GB database growing 5GB daily, after 30 days: Snapshots would use 245GB total. Backups would use 850GB total
Second article explains how to manage cloud storage costs better through a simple three-step approach.
First, we need to sort our data using tags. These tags help us know which data we need to keep for rules, safety, or business needs. Next, we need rules about how to handle our stored data. These rules can move data to cheaper storage after some time. Finally, use automation to save time and prevent mistakes.
FINOPS
FinOps Weekly Extra
Cristian forked ec2instances.info as a vendor-neutral alternative at cloud-instances.info
Kubernetes Cost Tracking Simplified with OpenCost, Prometheus, and Grafana
Cost estimation from Terraform with Infracost by Barbara Gaspar
Join the FinOps Weekly Community
We just launched a community and we are looking forward to have you with us!
An open space for making FinOps for Everyone a reality
NEWS
Announcements
Providers
AWS has added a new feature to their Billing and Cost Management Console that makes it easier to check your account's money matters.
Microsoft has rolled out new features for their Cost Management exports across all Azure regions and clouds.
Vendors
Finout winning a lot of awards lately in Israel startup ecosystem
🏆 Quick Wins Resources
Evergreen FinOps Resources to apply Today!
Professional Spotlight
Bart Clijsner
FinOps Mastery for Tool Creation
Bart has been one of the most active students in our first edition of Mastering FinOps! His work has been an inspiration for us to improve the course. With him, we realized that it can be really helpful for vendors making tools in Governance!
That’s all for this week. See you next Sunday!
Before You Go, Here’s How We Can Collaborate
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