Presented by

This 2026 report surveyed 260 finance executives on measuring AI spend and ROI. The blank-check era is ending:

87% must tie AI spend to outcomes within the year, and only 22% can today.

Key takeaways:

A SaaS company found a smart way to cut its AWS bill by 39% in just 12 weeks.That's real money saved while the team prepared for 10x growth. Here's what they did.

The team started at $35,000 per month in AWS spend. Without changes, that cost would have jumped to $350,000 a month as the business scaled.

They built a simple scoring system. Each fix was ranked by effort, impact, and risk. Easy, low-risk wins came first.

In the first four weeks, the team fixed storage and networking issues. They upgraded old storage volumes, rerouted traffic to avoid extra fees, and moved unused data to cheaper storage.

They also combined over 150 load balancers into just five. That single move saved $3,400 a month, with zero downtime. Next, they right sized computing power, matching servers to actual memory and CPU needs instead of guessing.

Finally, they adopted newer, cheaper processor types and automated how servers scale up and down. By the end, monthly savings hit $13,700, a 39% cut. At full growth scale, that adds up to about $1.64 million saved each year.

Read More

Discover how key SRE concepts like toil, SLAs, and blameless postmortems can be applied to FinOps practices.

Discover how to measure the real business value of AI, optimize cloud spend, and prove the ROI of your AI initiatives with practical FinOps strategies and expert insights.

📅 July 16
🕚 6:00 PM CEST (Spain) / 12:00 AM EST

Attend

Our next meetup will explore a topic many organizations are already facing: how to integrate AI, automation, and new operating models without losing control, efficiency, or visibility.

October 7 – Madrid (Utopicus Nuevos Ministerios)
https://luma.com/036wqk98

Cloud spending grows fast, and so does waste. FinOps brings engineering, finance, and business teams together to make smart choices about cloud spending. It is not a one-time cleanup, it is a daily habit built into how teams work. Most cloud waste hides in small places, not one big expense. Common cost leaks include:

- Overprovisioned EC2 instances and idle dev environments.

- Unattached storage volumes and old snapshots.

- Oversized Kubernetes clusters with unused CPU and memory.

- Databases sized for peak demand instead of real usage.

- Hidden networking charges like NAT gateways and cross zone traffic.

Good tagging is called out as a foundation piece. Without tags like Owner, Application, and Cost Center, teams cannot track who is spending what.

Also highlights the AWS Well-Architected Framework as a guide for measuring, attributing, and governing cloud costs.

Read More

Cloud costs keep climbing, and companies are finally putting real money behind tools to control them.

A new market report says the global cloud FinOps market was worth 15 billion dollars in 2025. It's expected to nearly double by 2026 and reach almost 35 billion dollars by 2034.

That's steady, strong growth every year through the next decade.

AI is changing how companies watch their cloud spending. New tools can spot unusual charges, suggest ways to save money, and handle routine budget alerts automatically.

Read More

Visit FinOps Weekly Hub, the place for discovering leading FinOps platforms and cloud cost management solutions. Compare vendors, explore new tools, and find the best fit for your cloud optimization and governance needs.

All in one site, completely free.

GPU management fees drop on ECS Managed Instances and EKS Auto Mode. G-series costs 35% less, and P-series plus Trainium cost 60% less, cutting the price of running AI workloads.

A new OpenSearch engine cuts log analytics storage by up to 70%. It also delivers up to 4x better price-performance for aggregation workloads.

Systems Manager drops its per-node hybrid fee. AWS removed the Advanced Instances Tier, so managing Azure VMs alongside AWS no longer costs extra per node.

Read All AWS Updates

Bigtable now supports tagging at creation and mandatory tag policies. This is now generally available, making cost allocation and governance easier.

Managed Service for Apache Kafka adds zstd compression. This lowers storage and bandwidth costs for high-throughput streaming workloads.

Read All GCP Updates

New guidance helps teams design lower-cost IaaS environments. It covers right-sizing, storage lifecycle policies, and networking efficiency to lower long-term costs.

Read All Azure Updates

AWS just launched a new tool that FinOps teams will want to know about. It is called FinOps Agent.

This AI tool watches your cloud bill and explains why costs changed. Instead of digging through Cost Explorer and CloudTrail for hours, you just ask it a question. It sends the answer straight to Slack or Jira. Here is what it does well.

It can run on a schedule and send weekly or monthly cost reports as HTML, PDF, or PPT files.

It can also watch for cost spikes and post the root cause in Slack automatically.

You can even upload a list of who owns each account, so it tags the right person by name when something goes wrong.

It is still in public preview and only set up through one AWS region, though it can see cost data from all your regions. Slack messages are one-way for now, and you cannot start a chat from Slack itself.

The AI output is a good first draft, not a final answer, so double check the numbers before sharing them with leadership. Setup took about fifteen minutes, and it is free during preview.

Read More

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

Cloud bills often show up a day late. By the time you see a cost report, that oversized VM has already been running for hours. A new open source tool called CloudTally tries to fix that gap.

Instead of waiting on billing exports, it looks at what cloud resources are actually running right now and prices them out instantly. It works with Google Cloud today, with AWS and Azure support planned for later.

Every cost estimate comes with a confidence label. Some numbers are exact, based on real pricing data. Others are estimated with clear assumptions spelled out.

Usage-based costs, like data transfer or serverless requests, get flagged as unknown rather than guessed at. Nothing gets silently marked as free when it is not.

The tool covers roughly 60 to 80 percent of typical cloud spend, the part tied to resources you can see running.

Read More

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_20 to get an instant 20% discount on the most prestigious certification bundles: