Happy holidays!
It’s that time of year when people brainstorm their New Year’s resolutions, and companies are laying out plans to hit the new year with a fresh cost management strategy in place. If you’re in the latter boat, check out these end-of-year wrap-ups that will help you start 2025 on the right foot, financially speaking.
- AWS CEO Matt Garman gave some hints about the future of AWS cloud in an interesting interview.
- The FinOps Foundation announced an end-of-year recap covering all the important FinOps information you may have missed.
- AWS released several useful blog posts detailing some of its newest cost management features.
Enjoy!
Top Cloud Cost News From November 2024 (Mostly)
We’re going to break a rule in just a moment. We know the headline just above says we’ll be talking about November’s cloud cost news. But something juicy happened on December 1st, and we won’t make you wait a whole month to hear about it.
AWS CEO Matt Garman gave an interview explaining the future of cloud services at AWS
AWS Re:Invent was December 2–6, and that means the last week of November was filled with hype surrounding the event topics. Part of that hype included this interview, published on December 1, which details AWS’s future cloud plans straight from the mouth of CEO Matt Garman.
You’ll want to give the full article a read to get all the details, but here’s the gist:
Garman acknowledges the rapid pace at which customers are adopting cloud services in an effort to stay at the forefront of AI development. AWS is planning some helpful innovations with generative AI that should hopefully keep costs low, but they plan to refresh and update their core services—compute, storage, and databases—as well. He wants AWS services across the board to become faster, more cost-effective, and more intuitive for customers.
Excitingly, he also mentions that AWS will make inference—the process by which AI predicts things—a core part of the stack alongside the other services.
We’re not sure exactly how these changes will affect your bottom line yet. But we expect to see major changes to how most customers use AWS services as AI becomes increasingly integrated into the provider’s platform.
The FinOps Foundation announced a December summit meeting to catch you up on all things FinOps
Somehow, we blinked, and it’s already the end of the year. If you missed the other FinOps meetings, didn’t attend Microsoft Ignite, AWS Re:Invent, or the FinOps X Europe convention, or you’re simply eager to squeeze a bit more stimulating FinOps conversation into your life before 2025 begins, quickly head over and sign up for the FinOps Foundation’s December summit, which will happen on the 12th.
Topics will include a recap of FinOps X Europe, re:Invent and Ignite, plus some important FinOps-related announcements. Join the call to listen as the Foundation fills you in on everything you need to know going into the new year.
AWS released several informative posts, training modules, and other resources that could help you manage costs
We love iterative improvements, which is why it’s always fun to dive into the latest announcements from each cloud provider to see how their efforts to keep costs manageable are shaping up. Last month, AWS published a bunch of announcements in their financial management blog category.
If you’re an AWS user, you might want to read through the following resources:
- Customizing invoices with the new Invoice Configuration tool
- Creating exports of your AWS usage and cost data
- Personalizing your cost estimates
- Analyzing the causes of cost anomalies
- Evaluating savings plans
- Receiving idle recommendations to help optimize your costs
- Learning all about AWS cloud financial management in a brand new set of training courses
These resources should give you plenty to work on if you’re in goal-setting mode for 2025.
Good Cloud Cost Management Should Extend Far Past Your AWS Usage
It’s great that AWS appears to be making cost management within its platform easier and more accessible. However, what if you use Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, or some other platform that has nothing to do with AWS? That’s no reason to let your cost optimization efforts falter.
Instead, you need a cost management tool like CloudZero that can aggregate all your cost data into one place and standardize it for an apples-to-apples comparison. With CloudZero, you don’t have to pore over each cloud provider bill every month, trying to figure out which dollars went where. All that information will be at your fingertips, seamlessly and effortlessly, ready for you to analyze and optimize. Simple!
to see CloudZero in action.
The Cloud Cost Playbook
The step-by-step guide to cost maturity
