Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Modern FP&A tools help SaaS businesses analyze financial performance in real time, forecast accurately, and align spend with business priorities — especially cloud spend, which can quickly spiral without visibility. Choosing the right FP&A tool for your business means understanding what you actually need it to do — whether that’s cloud cost visibility, more accurate forecasting, or tighter alignment between finance and engineering.

Welcome to March’s Cloud Economics Pulse, CloudZero’s monthly look at cloud spend as AI moves from cost line item to cost problem. Two things landed in February that are worth holding together. Last month’s Pulse established a new baseline, calling it a floor, not a ceiling.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been the leader in cloud computing for more than 10 years. Despite a decade of innovation, no AWS service encapsulates cloud computing principles better than Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Through EC2, AWS can offer flexible and scalable virtual infrastructure that can be ‘rented’ to run applications and workloads.

In March 2026, CloudZero’s Ben Austin, Director of Product Marketing, sat down with Ray Rike, Founder and CEO of Benchmarkit, to walk through findings from FinOps in the AI Era: A Critical Recalibration, a joint survey of nearly 500 organizational leaders on how they’re managing or, rather, struggling to manage AI costs.

This month, two FinOps research reports landed in close proximity. One from the FinOps Foundation — their 6th annual State of FinOps, drawing on a broad global practitioner community. One from CloudZero: FinOps in the AI Era: A Critical Recalibration, built on responses from 475 senior leaders at cloud-mature, AI-active organizations, with a focused lens on how AI is reshaping cloud cost management. Read each alone, and you get a useful snapshot for your business.

Years in the FinOps trenches taught me one thing: The data has never been the problem. The data exists. It’s out there, scattered across provider invoices, buried in tagging gaps, locked behind dashboards that maybe three people in your org actually know how to navigate. The real problem? Nobody can get to it when they need it. Engineers ship features without understanding what they cost the business, let alone whether they improved margin.

Somewhere between a model’s first demo and its first production workload, the cost conversation changes completely. Training is a big number, but it’s a finite one. Inference isn’t. Every user interaction, every query, every API call triggers compute behind the scenes — and unlike training, inference never stops billing. That shift from one-time expense to ongoing operational cost is where inference economics begins.

Today we’re announcing the CloudZero Claude Code Plugin, a new capability that puts CloudZero’s full cost intelligence model directly inside Claude Code, where engineers and technical FinOps practitioners already work. The plugin connects a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server and nine pre-packaged investigation skills to CloudZero’s cost data, covering cloud and AI spend across AWS, GCP, Azure, Snowflake, MongoDB, OpenAI, Anthropic, and more.

Cloud migration strategies range from quick rehosting to complete application refactoring. Lift and shift migration (also called rehosting) moves applications from on-premises to the cloud with minimal changes, promising speed and lower initial costs compared to other strategies. But does lift and shift actually deliver long-term savings? This guide examines when lift and shift makes sense, when it creates hidden costs, and what alternatives exist.

Whether you’re in finance or engineering, you know keeping your customers happy is the key to success. That means, your SaaS product or service needs to be available, reliable, and cost-effective virtually all the time. On that note, you can determine how stable and high-performing your service is depending on whether you use On-Demand or Spot Instances. Pricing, capacity, and flexibility will also vary depending on which of the two instances you choose.