Presented by

Want to appear here? Talk with us

AI Signals and Monitors is new from CloudZero. Sales, marketing, finance, and engineering are all running AI, and the bill lands weeks after the decisions that caused it. Now you see every department's spend, the person behind it, and the work it paid for, with an alert the moment something breaks pattern.

What changes:

BMW Group runs over 14,000 cloud accounts, and spotting cost problems by hand is impossible at that size.

To solve this, BMW built a system called CLEA that checks cloud spending every single day. Here is how it works:

It looks at 365 days of past spending for every account and service, then predicts what tomorrow's cost should be. If actual spending is way off from the prediction, it flags that day as unusual.

The system filters out small dollar amounts, services that naturally jump around like Glue or Athena, and teams that already asked for fewer alerts.

Only the biggest, most meaningful overspends reach an account owner's inbox.

The whole process runs across 14,000 accounts in about 20 minutes, and costs only around 50$/month to operate.

Read More

Cloud usage changes every week. Your commitments don't.

Workloads shift. Projects scale. Usage patterns evolve. And the commitment strategy that made sense yesterday can quietly become tomorrow's unnecessary spend.

Join us on October 14th for a live online session exploring how to build a cloud commitment strategy that continuously adapts to changing workloads and discover:

📅 October 14th
⏰ 12:00 PM ET / 5:00 PM UK
📍 Online

Amazon Bedrock added GPT-6.1 Sol, a new model that costs about 80% less than GPT-6 Astra while still performing well for AI tasks.

AWS Billing and Cost Management launched a new billing context API, making it easier to see billing hierarchy and rate details for better chargeback reporting.

EC2 Capacity Reservations can now have their start date postponed, so teams avoid paying for unused capacity when plans change.

Read All AWS Updates

Azure SQL Database Hyperscale Serverless now auto-pauses and resumes, cutting costs on idle databases without any app changes.

Azure SQL Database vector search is now generally available, helping teams skip extra AI search tools and cut down on duplicate infrastructure.

Read All Azure Updates

C4D machines now support Hyperdisk Throughput, helping heavy workloads run efficiently without overpaying for extra capacity.

Read All GCP Updates

Join FinOps professionals at the FinOps Weekly Summit 2026 and discover how to:

📅 October 20 & 21, 2026 - 9AM ET / 3PM CEST

Discover how Visual One Intelligence brings FinOps visibility and cost optimization to hybrid cloud environments. A practical look at hybrid cloud FinOps for organizations managing complex multi-cloud and on-prem infrastructure.

If you use BigQuery, you already know the bill can be confusing. Simon Seifer, a FinOps expert who has worked at Looker and Google, breaks down why the usual cloud cost advice does not work here. He explains that BigQuery costs come from four layers.

The first layer is your query itself. Writing smarter queries, using caching, and organizing tables well can cut costs fast, sometimes by a third or more.

The second layer is pricing. Choosing between on-demand and slot based pricing can change a bill by 30 to 70 percent, depending on the workload.

The third layer is capacity commitments. Buying too much locked-in capacity can leave a company paying for slots nobody uses. One company found over 20 percent of its paid capacity was sitting idle.

The fourth layer is your contract with Google itself, handled by finance and procurement teams.

The big point here is that these layers interact.

A smart query fix after you sign a three year contract may not save a cent, since the capacity is already paid for.

Companies that want real savings need to fix query waste first, then negotiate capacity and contracts with that leaner usage in mind.

Read More

Cloud bills often hide costs nobody notices, like disks left over after a server is gone or a static IP nobody uses anymore.

Zombiescan, a free open-source tool that scans every Google Cloud project you have access to and finds these forgotten resources.

It checks 20 different types of waste, from unattached disks to idle GKE clusters, and prices each one using Google's own billing data.

In a real test across 75 projects, the tool found 713 wasted items costing $387.74 a month, or close to $4,653 a year. The scan took just 79 seconds and never touched or changed anything, it only reads and reports.

- The tool works project by project instead of guessing at totals, so each finding points to one exact resource and its cost.

- It shows prices with dates and notes what discounts are excluded, so nobody mistakes list price for their actual rate.

- It builds a cleanup plan as a script, but never runs it automatically, keeping humans in control of deletions.

Some waste, like empty networks, gets flagged but needs manual cleanup because deleting them wrong can break other things.

Read More

S3 storage costs quietly grow every month, and most teams never notice until the bill is much bigger than it should be. This article shows how to build an automated agent that finds wasted S3 spending, without ever giving it the power to delete your data. What it searches for:

The agent only reads data and writes a Terraform pull request. It cannot touch or delete anything in S3 directly. A separate, already-trusted pipeline applies the change. This keeps a human in control of every risky decision, like permanently deleting old file versions or moving data to Glacier.

A built-in calculator checks the real payback time before any storage class change is suggested, so no shortcuts are taken based on guesses.

Read More

Visit FinOps Weekly Hub

Find all Jobs in our FinOps Jobs directory or join FinOps Weekly Jobs Newsletter below to have a weekly email with the most relevant updates every Monday

Use code: FINOPSWEEKLY_20 to get an instant 20% discount on the most prestigious certification bundles:

Get Certified for Less

Join the Slack community where the real FinOps conversations happen