Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

Global cloud spending will surge past $700 billion this year. Megacaps alone will spend more than $300 billion on AI in 2025, with much more on the way. The innovation potential of the cloud has never been higher, never been more hotly contested, and never come with a higher price tag. In the late 2000s, the cloud reshaped the global economy and enabled life as we know it. Now, in the mid 2020s, AI is poised to do the same.

As your applications scale across cloud and SaaS providers, allocating costs and optimizing workloads become increasingly important—and challenging. Without access to cost data in their daily workflows, engineering teams can’t easily understand the cost of their resources and identify where they can reduce their spend. And while FinOps teams have access to cost data, they often review this information in silos.

The cloud is the backbone of modern businesses, revolutionizing the trajectory of innovation, technology and business itself. While its promise of instant scalability and flexibility drives unprecedented growth, these same advantages can become a double-edged sword. The ease of spinning up new resources, automating deployments, and expanding services across regions—all of which make the cloud so powerful—can quickly lead to sprawling infrastructure and runaway costs if not carefully managed.

At its core, FinOps is a cultural practice that brings together finance, technology, and business teams to manage and optimize cloud spending. For SaaS companies, where cloud infrastructure is integral to operations, FinOps practices directly impact the bottom line. But as with any emerging discipline, the big question is: Is a FinOps certification truly worth the time and financial investment?