Author: Steph Gooch

With re:Invent 2025 behind us and over 60 launch announcements, here are five hidden gems that may have gone unnoticed but still have big cost impacts. While everyone was talking about the database savings plans and AI announcements, these quieter launches are already helping customers optimize their cloud spend in creative ways.

It’s Friday morning. You’re expecting an easy day when suddenly—ding—a budget alert hits your inbox. Not only have you been notified, but so has your manager and the FinOps team. Your relaxed Friday just disappeared.
Sound familiar? This scenario happens more often than it should. With Kiro CLI  or Amazon Q Developer IDE, AWS’s generative AI-powered assistant, you can prevent these panic-inducing moments while saving significant money. Here are five powerful ways to use AI to optimize your AWS infrastructure which came from a re:Invent 2025 talk: Optimize AWS Costs: Developer Tools and Techniques.

The decision between Containers and Serverless Functions – or the implementation of both – should be driven by a thorough understanding of workload characteristics, cost implications, and operational requirements. As FinOps professionals, you should work closely with development and operations teams to analyze usage patterns, model costs under different scenarios, and consider factors like development velocity, operational overhead, and long-term maintainability. By leveraging the strengths of both Containers and Serverless technologies, you can build flexible, cost-effective cloud architectures that adapt to changing business needs while optimizing resource utilization and expenditure.

With re:Invent 2024 in the books, and over 50 launch announcements, here are four that we’re most excited about. The overarching theme of these launches appears to be leveraging Amazon’s automation capabilities to optimize costs and improve efficiency for customers.

We want to show you the benefits of CUR 2.0 and provide steps on how to migrate to CUR 2.0, so you don’t lose out! CUR 2.0 builds upon the Legacy CUR, while offering several key improvements for your cost tracking. Both 2.0 and Legacy allow you to analyze AWS costs in greater detail and accuracy, especially by including Resource IDs and hourly time granularity.

You can use Amazon Athena, a lightweight serverless, analytics tool, to query your AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR). This enables you to dive into your cost and usage data for spend reporting and optimization analysis. However, you may not know all the opportunities you can optimize your Amazon S3 costs by taking advantage of S3 Lifecycle configuration.

AWS publishes more than 200 announcements per month to the “What’s New with AWS” website and RSS feed, so there’s a lot to get excited about. However, finding relevant announcements in these updates can be a challenge for engineers, finance professionals, or FinOps stakeholders. In this blog, we will deploy a solution to collect cost optimization related announcements from the “What’s New with AWS” feed and pass them into a dedicated Slack channel.

At AWS re:Invent 2023, there were over 40 FinOps-related announcements. However, some announcements may not even seem FinOps related at first glance. In this blog, we are going to look at AWS re:Invent announcements that are not specifically targeted at cost optimization but can help you optimize. The announcements highlighted in this blog may not appear as ways to save money initially, but they will have a big impact on your spend if you use them to their full potential.

When FinOps Practitioners share recommendations for cost optimization, they can often be met with a “No”, a “I can’t right now”, or “It’s not my priority” from a Developers (Devs). According to the FinOps Foundation’s “State of FinOps 2023” report, the number one pain point was getting engineers to take action. But, I am here to say, “it’s not the Devs fault!” We spoke with customers who have overcome this roadblock and want to share the lessons learned with you! This blog will walk through 10 ways you can work with your engineers to establish a FinOps culture at your organization.

That’s a wrap on Season 6 of the AWS cost Twitch show, ‘The Keys to AWS Optimization”. In case you missed it or are looking to explore a new cost optimization resource, we’re sharing the top 3 episodes of Season 6.