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Ready to dive into FinOps in the AI Era report?

Join us for a live session as we discuss what finance and FinOps leaders must do to recalibrate cost, margin, and visibility in the AI era.

The FinOps Foundation just released their 6th annual survey with data from 1,192 people who manage over $83 billion in cloud spending.

The big news is that FinOps is no longer just about explaining what you already spent on cloud services. It's now about helping companies make smarter choices before they buy technology.

AI is everywhere now: 98% of teams now manage AI spending, up from just 31% two years ago. But here's the tricky part: many companies are asking their FinOps teams to pay for new AI projects by finding savings in other areas. It's like your boss saying "find money in the couch cushions to buy a new car."

FinOps teams now manage way more than just cloud: 90% now handle SaaS spending. 64% manage software licenses. 57% manage private cloud. 48% manage data centers. 28% are even starting to track labor costs.

Think of it this way: FinOps used to be the team that watched your electric bill. Now they watch your electric bill, your water bill, your phone bill, and they're starting to track how much you pay your employees too.

The easy savings are gone: Teams report they've already found the "big rocks" of waste. One team said they hit 97% optimization and the last 3% isn't worth chasing for business reasons.

FinOps moved up the corporate ladder 78% of teams now report to the CTO or CIO, not the CFO. For example, 53% of teams with C-suite access help pick cloud services, compared to only 12% of teams that only work with directors.

Teams stay small but their job gets bigger: Even companies spending over $100 million keep lean teams of 8 to 10 people plus 3 to 10 contractors. They scale by training champions in other departments, not by hiring more people.

The most wanted skill right now is AI cost management, followed by tooling expertise and automation.

FinOps is becoming the hub for related teams: FinOps teams work most often with IT Financial Management teams to share data.They also work with IT Asset Management teams on software licenses, IT Service Management on policies, and sustainability teams on carbon reporting.

The bottom line: FinOps is growing from a team that explains past cloud bills into a strategic function that helps companies make better technology buying decisions across their entire tech stack. The FinOps Foundation even updated their mission statement to reflect this change, from "managing the value of cloud" to "managing the value of technology."

But does that make sense? Let me know, reply to this email with your thoughts.

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Amazon Bedrock Project Mantle and six new open-weight models improve serverless inference performance and lower operational costs.

AWS Backup now supports single-action cross-Region snapshot copies to air-gapped vaults, reducing complexity and disaster recovery costs.

Finally, new EC2 instances (Hpc8a, C8gn) deliver up to 25-30% better price-performance for compute-intensive workloads.

Read All AWS Updates

Carbon Footprint updates will allocate AI inference emissions at the SKU level, providing granular data for sustainability-informed cost decisions.

Compute Engine instance flexibility (GA) for bulk VM creation minimizes failed launches and manual retries, while Hyperdisk Exapools (GA) enables massive pooled block storage (up to 5 EiB) with potential unit-cost savings for large-scale AI/ML workloads.

Read All GCP Updates

AKS node auto-provisioning (GA) reduces operational overhead and costs associated with mis-sized nodes. Additionally, new reliability guidance provides prescriptive playbooks for balancing observability and redundancy spend against cost trade-offs.

Read All Azure Updates

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Date: February 26th, 6PM CET / 12PM EST

Learn How to make Cloud Cost Governance in your Organization using Incentives, AI, and Policy. We got Tatum Tummins, PM from Kion, talk about how to prioritize business value, the role of AI in FinOps, and real-life examples of successful cloud cost governance policies.

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Great analysis by Frank Contrepois. Your cloud cost dashboard shows you spent $47,382 so far this month, and you feel like you know where you stand. But that number is provisional, and it will change before the month ends.

Cloud vendors like AWS actually tell you this in their data. The Cost and Usage Report includes a column that marks when a line item is final. Until that date shows up, the data can still shift. Most FinOps dashboards ignore this signal completely.

Even predictable costs like support fees or Reserved Instance charges often show up as big spikes on day one of the month. It looks scary. It looks important. But it is just how billing works.

Before month end, you are mostly seeing usage data that is delayed by 24 hours and can still be re-rated. After month end, the real math happens. Discounts get applied. Enterprise agreements kick in. Credits are calculated. Support fees are finalized. That is when billing becomes actual billing.

But we act like mid-month costs are real-time operational metrics. When you see a dashboard update every hour, it feels like control. When you see a number, it feels like truth.

FinOps sits between two different speeds. Engineering teams want immediate feedback. Finance teams work in monthly reconciliation cycles. If you only optimize for refresh rates and decimal precision, you mistake visibility for control.

Most FinOps impact does not come from watching numbers move every hour. It comes from changing behavior, building guardrails, aligning incentives, and making trade-offs clear.

Frank now starts every project by asking what behavior needs to change and what pattern needs to be visible. Then he picks the largest time window and slowest refresh rate that still supports that goal.

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AWS Doctor is a free command-line tool that helps you find wasted money in your AWS cloud accounts. The tool was built by a cloud architect who got tired of manually checking AWS bills and hunting for waste.

The tool scans your AWS account for common waste like elastic IPs that sit idle, EC2 instances that are stopped but still costing money, and old snapshots nobody uses anymore. It also catches incomplete S3 uploads that pile up charges and S3 buckets missing lifecycle policies.

Instead of just showing you this month versus last month, it compares the same time windows. This means you see real cost changes, not just differences caused by comparing 31 days to 28 days. You get a simple chart showing how your spending has moved over half a year.

You can install it with Homebrew on Mac or Linux, run a one-line script, or use Go if you're technical.

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Great reflection article by Alberto. In FinOps, there are frameworks everywhere, tools to evaluate, certifications to consider, and a hundred different opinions about the "right" way to do it. He shares what actually helped when starting out: not more content, but better ways to think about cloud costs.

Tagging is a people problem, not a tech problem- The solution starts small: pick a core set of tags that everyone must use, make them visible before you enforce them, and build trust before you build guardrails. Forcing perfect tagging too early just creates friction without delivering savings.

Total spend is the wrong number to watch. Most cloud cost conversations start with "how much did we spend this month?" That's the wrong question. The right question is: what did each dollar buy us? Cost per customer, cost per transaction, cost per feature - these unit economics tell you if you're actually improving.

FinOps is a culture problem, not an engineering one. Oversized servers, runaway log costs, inefficient functions - these aren't caused by lack of knowledge. They happen when cost isn't visible, ownership isn't clear, and incentives aren't aligned.Starting simple works better than starting sophisticated: basic tagging, simple cost reports, manual reviews, and fast feedback.

The real work of FinOps happens when teams start asking uncomfortable questions: Do we really need this resource? What value does it deliver? Who owns this decision?

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Cloud Cost Expert

An experienced cloud cost specialist, with extensive knowledge in technical analysis and optimization of AWS environments.

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P.S. Azure FinOps Course already started. Thanks everyone who joined there.