Together with Kion
The Intersection of AI Governance and FinOps: A CloudOps Approach
Discover how AI, governance, and FinOps intersect to shape the future of cloud financial management.
Learn why policy, accountability, and intelligent automation are essential for aligning spend, security, and operations at scale.
Read the whitepaper to explore FinOps+ strategies that empower you to govern smarter and operate with confidence.
GOOGLE CLOUD
GCP Launches Spend-Based CUDs
Google Cloud is making big changes to how their spend-based committed use discounts work, starting January 21, 2026. These changes aim to make billing simpler and give customers more flexibility.
The main improvements include:
Simpler billing: Instead of getting credits that reduce your bill later, Google Cloud will now show you discounted prices right away.
More products covered: The discount program now includes more Google Cloud services.
Better tracking: A new system called "consumption models" will help you understand different types of pricing and discounts. Each service can have multiple pricing models, but only one applies to your usage at any given time.
Updated user interface: The reports section gets new filters and better ways to track your discount performance.
Early access option: Starting July 15, 2025, customers can choose to switch to the new system early instead of waiting for the automatic change in January 2026.
What you need to do: If you export billing data to analyze costs, you'll need to update your systems to work with the new data format. Google provides sample data and example queries to help with this transition.
The changes affect most spend-based discount programs including BigQuery, Cloud Run, and Compute Engine flexible discounts. However, some programs like VMware Engine and resource-based discounts remain unchanged.
AWS
Automate AWS Cost Allocation with Lambda & EventBridge
AWS bills can get scary fast if you don't know where your money is going.
But here's the good news: you don't need expensive third-party tools to get control of your cloud costs. AWS gives you 15 built-in tools that can help you see, fix, and control your spending.
Phase 1: See Where Money Goes
Cost Explorer
Cost and Usage Report
Cost Categories
Cost Allocation Tags
AWS Budgets
Cost Anomaly Detection
Phase 2: Cut Your Costs
Savings Plans
Reserved Instances
Spot Instances
Auto Scaling Groups
Compute Optimizer
Trusted Advisor.
Cost Optimization Hub
S3 Storage Lens
Phase 3: Set Spending Rules
AWS Organizations
Service Control Policies
Tag Policies
FINOPS EVENTS
FinOps Weekly Summit 2025
23rd of October, 2025
Stop Chasing Cloud Costs. Start Driving Business Value.
The FinOps Weekly Summit 2025 is the one online event this year designed to give you the actionable playbooks you need to transform your FinOps practice. Move from reactive fire-fighting to strategic leadership by learning directly from the world’s top experts on unit economics, automation, and governance.
Become:
A known brand by Sponsoring the event
A FinOps Expert by Submitting your talk to the event.
A Real Practitioner by Learning from FinOps Experts attending the event.
This is where the future of FinOps is decided.
Don’t get left behind.
23rd October - 4:00 PM CEST / 10AM EST
FINOPS CULTURE
Behavioral Science in FinOps: Nudging for Change
A cloud cost expert has been studying how people make decisions and found some smart ways to help companies save money without forcing anyone to do anything.
The writer learned about "choice architecture" from a book called Nudge. This is basically how we set up choices to make some options easier than others.
Think of it like putting healthy snacks at eye level in a cafeteria while hiding the candy bars on the bottom shelf. Here's how this works for cloud costs:
Smart defaults: When engineers build software, they often just pick whatever option is already selected.
Show costs where people work: Instead of hiding cost information in monthly reports, put it right next to the performance data that teams check every day.
Add tiny speed bumps: Don't block people from using expensive resources, but add a small step like showing a cost summary before they proceed.
Share success stories: When one team saves money using a smart technique, share that win with other teams.
CLOUD PROVIDERS
Updates from All Cloud Providers in July !?
AWS
AWS Tag Policies now support wildcards in their rules, making resource governance more powerful. You can require tags like project-* across all EC2 instances, improving cost allocation and reporting for FinOps teams.
Amazon ECR introduces tag immutability exceptions, letting specific users override image protection rules when needed. This balances strong governance with operational flexibility.
Cost Optimization Hub displays account names alongside IDs (goodbye "123456789012," hello "Production-Web-App"), making it faster to identify savings opportunities and stakeholders.
EC2 instances can now skip OS-level shutdown during stop/terminate operations, speeding up scaling actions—especially valuable in development environments.
Microsoft Azure
Savings plan recommendations now support 7, 30, or 60-day usage analysis, providing more accurate suggestions that match your actual patterns and maximize savings confidence.
Azure Advisor identifies idle MySQL Flexible Servers, automatically flagging unused databases that drain your budget without manual metric analysis.
Google Cloud
Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) now handle multiple prices for the same SKU, automatically managing complex custom pricing deals and making it easier to maximize commitment benefits.
KPIs
Enhanced Effective Savings Rate Formula
The Effective Savings Rate (ESR) is one of the most helpful measures for rate optimization. The simple ESR has problems when measuring how well a central FinOps team performs:
You can't compare ESR between different customers because they might have totally different base discounts from their cloud provider.
A high simple ESR doesn't always mean great FinOps work. It might just mean the company got a good discount deal upfront.Here's how to make ESR calculations more accurate:
The Enhanced ESR Formula
The new formula focuses only on spending that FinOps teams can actually control and optimize.
Actual spend with discounts equals eligible spend not covered by commitments plus existing commitments.
On-demand equivalent spend is the eligible spend at regular prices without any commitments.
Real Example
A customer uses 100 virtual machines and 100 managed disks in July 2024. They bought 50 one-year reservations for VMs in June 2024.
With the enhanced calculation, their ESR was 16.7% for July. The maximum possible ESR would have been 40% if they had covered all eligible resources with commitments.
📺️ VIDEO
Expert Masterclass: FOCUS Success Case in Azure
In this Masterclass, we teach you how to design an event-driven architecture based on Azure Functions that processes billing information and divides costs using a combination of general rules and specific allocations that can be managed and pre-set in advance. Using FOCUS and Power BI
🎖️ MENTION OF HONOUR
How to Reduce the Costs of your Azure VMs
Running virtual machines in Microsoft Azure can get expensive fast if you're not careful. Here are the key money-saving tricks:
Turn off what you don't use. This sounds simple, but it works. If you have test servers or development machines that don't need to run all the time, shut them down.
Buy in advance with Reserved Instances. If you know you'll need certain virtual machines running 24/7 for a year or three years, you can prepay and save up to 72% compared to regular pricing.
Use burst-capable machines for light workloads. B-series virtual machines cost less because they're designed for apps that usually don't need much power but sometimes need a quick boost.
Try Spot Virtual Machines for flexible jobs. These use leftover Azure capacity at up to 90% off regular prices.
Use your existing Windows licenses. If you already own Windows Server or SQL Server licenses with Software Assurance, you can use them in Azure through the Hybrid Benefit program instead of paying again.
Pick cheaper regions when location doesn't matter. If your virtual machine doesn't need to be in a specific place, run it somewhere cheaper.
Check your spending regularly. Azure Cost Management and Azure Advisor will tell you which virtual machines are wasted money and suggest better options.
The smartest long-term move is moving away from virtual machines entirely when possible.
Professional Spotlight
Thomas Maurer
FinOps Azure Thought Leader
Recently discovered Thomas blogsite, amazing resource for valuable Azure information alongside his Youtube channel. I can only recommend you follow him as it’s a must for Azure practitioners.
That’s all for this week. See you next Sunday!
Join The Largest FinOps Online Event of 2025
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Transform from reactive fire-fighting to strategic leadership — Learn the proven frameworks that top practitioners use to turn cloud cost management into a competitive advantage
Master AI-powered cost optimization — Get exclusive access to the latest automation tools and techniques that can reduce your cloud spend by up to 40% while accelerating innovation
Build bulletproof unit economics — Walk away with actionable playbooks for calculating true cloud ROI and proving business value to executives who control your budget
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October 23rd, 2025 | 4:00 PM - 8:00 PM CEST
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