Category: Cloud Cost Optimization

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.

A cloud vendor’s Cloud Financial Management (CFM) capabilities are crucial for your success in the cloud. Whether you’re planning future investments, optimizing current spending, or allocating costs across your organization, having the right CFM tools makes all the difference. AWS is proud to be recognized with the 1st place in forecasting and estimation use case, and top 3 in driving cost efficiency use case and promotion accountability use case in the latest 2025 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Cloud Financial Management Tools research.

Are you ready to maximize your Cloud Financial Management (CFM) learning and networking time at re:Invent 2025? As usual, I’ve put together this comprehensive guide to help you plan your schedule and make the most of the CFM sessions available this year. This year’s catalog features an exciting mix of content across different formats: from breakout, chalk talks, workshops, builder’s sessions, to code talks.

Introduction Unlocking FinOps capabilities for modern cloud teams just got simpler with the introduction of the AWS Billing and Cost Management Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, which makes advanced cost analysis and optimization features directly available to your favorite AI assistant or chatbot. By integrating natural language queries, secure local credentials, and real-time access to […]

As organizations expand, FinOps teams require a comprehensive overview of AWS Savings Plans commitments to maximize utilization efficiency. This solution involves implementing monitoring systems and automated alerts to identify underutilized Savings Plans within the eligible return period. In this blog post, we provide AWS CloudFormation templates that create AWS Step Functions state machine, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) topic, Amazon EventBridge scheduler, and necessary AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles to automate the monitoring of newly purchased Savings Plans and highlight those that are underutilized.

Building on our previous discussions about AWS generative AI cost optimization, the fourth blog of the five-part blog series focuses on maximizing value from Amazon Q, AWS’s generative AI-powered assistant. While our earlier posts covered custom model development with Amazon EC2 and SageMaker AI and foundation models with Amazon Bedrock, today we’ll explore strategies to optimize costs when implementing Amazon Q. From selecting the right pricing tier and implementing strategic user management to optimizing content indexing and improving cost predictability, we’ll share practical approaches that help you balance functionality with cost efficiency. Whether you’re using Amazon Q Business for your generative AI–powered assistant or Amazon Q Developer to enhance developer productivity, these best practices will help you make informed decisions about your Q implementation.

We’re excited to engage with the FinOps community at FinOps X 2025 in San Diego, June 2-5. If you’re looking to spend quality time with the AWS team, here’s where you can find us from reception parties on Monday evening, keynote, breakout sessions, booth, and customer meetings. Can’t wait to see you all soon!

With great pleasure, I am happy to share with you the ten features recently added to the AWS Cloud Financial Management portfolio of services. We hope that these ten new features will help accomplish your daily FinOps tasks more effectively. These new features are like our holiday gifts to you. Enjoy your holiday and these special gifts from us. We look forward to hearing about your experiences with them.

Starting today, you can easily model your next Savings Plans purchases and evaluate the impact on cost, coverage, and utilization in the AWS Billing and Cost Management Console. You can input your own commitment amount or generate a recommended commitment that is designed to maximize your cost savings. Furthermore, you can customize your analysis by selecting a specific lookback period and/or excluding expiring Savings Plans to plan for upcoming renewals.

Starting today, AWS Compute Optimizer will give recommendations to clean up idle resources. AWS Compute Optimizer historically has been focused on providing rightsizing recommendations to save cost and improve performance. To help you drive further cost savings, we are expanding the focus to now include detecting and recommending cleanup of idle recommendations. With this launch, you will get recommendations for idle EBS volumes, ECS tasks on running on Fargate, EC2 instances, EC2 Auto Scaling groups, and RDS instances.