TOGETHER WITH CLOUDZERO
Their AI Bill Tripled. Finance Approved More.
On August 27, CloudZero opens its own books: Customer Success AI spend tripled in a quarter, nobody formally approved it, and the team wants to double down. SVP Matt Katz makes the capital case to finance, and CPO Scott Castle shows the data underneath it.
You'll leave able to answer:
What a dollar of AI spend actually produces, sized honestly
How to know AI drove the result, not just a good quarter
What a defensible “spend more on AI” decision looks like
FINOPS
How to Reduce Cloud Costs Without Breaking Production
Cutting your AWS bill without breaking production comes down to one idea: treat cost cutting as an engineering job, not a finance task. 8 steps to follow:
Start with visibility, not cuts. Break down bills by service, region, team, and tag.
Untagged resources should get flagged automatically, not buried in a shared bill.
Not everything expensive is wasteful. A costly database may be critical. A quiet EC2 instance running with no real workload is often the better target.
Rightsizing and autoscaling save more than deleting servers. Kubernetes nodes can look busy but sit underused.
Spot instances and scheduled scaling cut costs for workloads that don't run all day.
Commitments should follow or be along with rightsizing, not come first. Size Savings Plans to your baseline usage, not peak usage.
Flexibility often beats a slightly bigger discount.
Networking and storage are silent cost drains. Cross-AZ traffic and NAT Gateway routing added surprise charges. Lifecycle policies for logs and old snapshots stopped costs from quietly piling back up.
WEBINAR
Finding Cloud Waste Billing Data Misses
A live conversation with me on the cloud waste your cost tooling can't see. I break down audience-submitted waste live in the closing segment.
📅 September 23rd, 2026
🕚 5:00 PM Spain / 11:00 PM ET
CLOUD PROVIDERS
AWS Rolls Out Free Billing Dashboards While GCP Expands GPU Discounts and Azure Preps VMware Changes
AWS
AWS added preconfigured billing dashboards at no extra cost, giving teams a ready-made view of spend, commitments, and forecasts.
CUDOS dashboard now tracks Bedrock token and cache efficiency, with a corrected cost-per-million-token formula for better AI cost analysis.
Amazon Bedrock offers lower global pricing for OpenAI models, giving teams a cheaper inference option with full cost-tracking support.
AWS Marketplace can now alert buyers to pricing and subscription changes, helping teams catch price hikes before renewal.
Read All AWS Updates
Google Cloud
Flexible GPU commitments are now generally available for G2 and G4 machines, letting teams shift committed spend across regions and services.
Google Cloud updated its Carbon Footprint methodology with more precise energy certificate data, delaying the refresh by one month.
Read All GCP Updates
Azure
License-included Azure VMware Solution will retire in August 2027, so teams should start budgeting for the new bring-your-own-license model now.
Microsoft shared a FinOps approach for AI agent costs, using model routing and caching to match spend with the cheapest model that works.
Read All Azure Updates
EVENTS
FinOps Weekly Summit 2026
Join FinOps professionals at the FinOps Weekly Summit 2026 and discover how to:
Transform FinOps from reactive cost control into strategic business value
Build scalable unit economics for the AI era
Learn proven strategies from organizations managing billions in cloud spend
📅 October 20 & 21, 2026 - 9AM ET / 3PM CEST
VIDEOS & PODCASTS
Why Tokenomics Is Wrong
I break down why terms like "Tokenomics" create confusion with the blockchain world, the right word to call it and why managing AI costs (AI Economics) needs to be a standalone practice separate from FinOps.
AWS
How to understand and estimate combined AWS WAF and AWS Shield Advanced costs
Security costs on AWS can get confusing fast once AWS WAF and AWS Shield Advanced work together. AWS WAF and Shield Advanced both charge based on usage, like request volume and data transfer, so costs shift with traffic.
When you turn on Shield Advanced, it covers some AWS WAF charges automatically, like a chunk of web rule capacity and standard body inspection. But not all charges go away, and this makes historical cost comparisons tricky since billing labels change once Shield Advanced kicks in.
The article walks through 3 tools for different needs: The AWS Pricing Calculator works best for early planning before you turn anything on. Cost Explorer helps you track actual spend and trends after deployment. For the full picture, especially when both services run together, Cost and Usage Reports give you detailed, resource-level data to see exactly what Shield Advanced is covering and what still costs extra.
AWS team shares real sample queries so teams can forecast monthly bills, plan phased rollouts, and separate fixed subscription fees from variable data transfer costs.
AZURE
Three Azure Cost Leaks - And the Analysis Process That Found Them
This article breaks down 3 real Azure cost leaks the author found, and more importantly, shows how he found them.
VMSS autoscaling issue: new instances were marked "healthy" before they finished warming up. This caused extra scale-outs and instances running longer than needed. Fix: a proper readiness check instead of a basic health probe.
ADF pipeline issue: a nightly data pipeline used 32 DIUs to guarantee speed it never actually needed. Cutting to 8 DIUs still met the deadline, saved money, and reduced costly retries.
Blob Storage issue: staging data was never deleted after loading into Snowflake. Six months of buildup added storage and read costs for data nobody used anymore. A simple lifecycle policy solved it.
Each case looked small alone, just a few dollars a month. Multiplied across many pipelines and services, the numbers added up to real annual savings.
🎖️ MENTION OF HONOUR
Oracle OCI Focus Reports: How to Get Them
Cloud costs look different depending on which provider you use. That makes it hard to compare spending across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and OCI. This article explains a tool from Oracle that fixes that problem.
Using the Cost Reports FOCUS Converter. Oracle's tool takes OCI billing reports and turns them into FOCUS format automatically.
You just set up permissions, create a small cloud application, and fill in a few settings like dates and storage locations. Once it runs, you get clean FOCUS reports sitted by year, month, and day.
Teams can then plug this data straight into tools like Power BI, Tableau, or Excel.
This saves time normally spent building custom scripts to translate billing data.
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