Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you’re struggling to contain cloud costs in this suddenly volatile AI-fixated environment, it might be time to consider FinOps as an exercise in granular allocation and unit economics, with a focus on outcome.

I’ve seen firsthand how persona-centric FinOps creates realized savings through synergy. I’m a Certified AWS Solutions Architect, FinOps Engineer, and Customer Success leader who’s had the joy of turning cloud confusion into clarity. I’ve added a customer story below — but hold up, we’ve got onboarding optimizing to do.

Want to know how to get a job in FinOps? You’re not alone. FinOps careers are rapidly emerging as essential roles in tech, helping companies manage cloud costs without slowing down innovation. These roles sit at the intersection of finance, engineering, and cloud operations. FinOps roles and responsibilities are expanding fast. In this guide, you’ll learn what FinOps professionals do, how to frame your skills for the job, what certifications help, and how to grow your FinOps career over time.

When rideshare drivers talk about a “side hustle”, they mean working a few hours on weekends to make extra cash. That’s fine for pocket money, but it’s catastrophic when the “hustle” is controlling your cloud and AI spend. Right now, too many companies run FinOps the way they run the office coffee pot: A volunteer refills it when things look empty.

FinOps is booming as a function. The global cloud FinOps market will grow from $13.5 billion in 2024 to $23.3 billion in 2029 — a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.4%, according to Research and Markets. That’s in response to sharp increases in cloud spend. About $723 billion is expected to be spent on public cloud services in 2025, up from $596 billion the year before according to a Gartner report.

“It started as an experiment.” That’s how it begins at most companies. A small team spins up a few GPU instances to train a proof-of-concept model. Maybe it’s a fraud detection algorithm. Maybe it’s GenAI for support tickets. Either way, it’s just a test. Then the results come in, and they’re promising. Suddenly, that model is powering new features. Teams are fine-tuning LLMs in parallel.

You’re probably not combing through cloud bills. That’s not your job as CEO. But if no one on your executive team can tell you what it costs to serve a customer, ship a feature, or launch a new product line, that’s a problem. Not a someday problem. A right-now, quietly-draining-your-margins kind of problem. FinOps tends to get lumped in with cost-cutting — some finance thing, some DevOps thing. But that framing misses the point. Done right, FinOps is a growth enabler.

When you adopt FinOps to maximize the value of your cloud spending, you may have some simple first steps you can take to gain cost efficiency. For example, you can find and delete any unused resources to quickly realize a one-time optimization. But the ongoing work to manage cloud costs becomes complex as your organization grows, your infrastructure spans multiple clouds, and you can't easily see the full value of your cloud spending by tracking only the bottom line.

In recent years, cloud financial management has evolved beyond what many cloud stakeholders anticipated. The overwhelm has led too many companies to struggle to accurately monitor, allocate, and optimize their cloud costs. This issue cost companies about 30% of their cloud budgets in 2022 alone, according to Gartner. With FinOps, you can prevent this bleeding without sacrificing innovation. Yet, taking a manual approach to FinOps can be inefficient and error-prone.

AWS remains the largest cloud service provider (CSP) of the 21st century. It also provides over 240 cloud-based products and services. In some cases, these services help customers like you collect, analyze, and act on data about cloud usage and related costs. In this post, we explore how AWS services support FinOps’ best practices, including the features they offer. If you are looking for even more robust AWS FinOps tools, we will also include third-party platforms.