AWS re:Invent 2025 - FinOps+: A New Era of Accelerating Value (COP211)

AWS re:Invent 2025 - FinOps+: A New Era of Accelerating Value (COP211)

Overview of the FinOps Industry

• The FinOps industry has seen several key developments over the past year:
  • Top priorities for FinOps practitioners are reducing waste, optimizing spend, and improving cost allocation and forecasting
  • Emerging focus areas include FinOps governance/policy at scale and managing costs beyond just public cloud
  • The FinOps Foundation introduced the concept of "scopes" to outline different areas of technology investment for FinOps
  • The common billing schema 1.2 was released, leading to increased adoption and exploration by practitioners and vendors
  • AI is becoming increasingly prevalent in the FinOps space

Introducing FinOps+

• FinOps+ is a modern approach to FinOps that aims to:
  • Solve challenges more proactively
  • Drive efficiency
  • Enable smarter decision-making
• FinOps+ is not trying to redefine FinOps, but rather build upon existing processes and practices to set organizations up for success as FinOps evolves
• FinOps+ consists of three key pillars:
  1. Automated Governance
  2. AI-driven
  3. Beyond Public Cloud

Automated Governance

• Automated Governance involves three steps:
  1. Policy: Defining organizational policies around waste, orphaned resources, retention, etc.
  2. Automation: Translating policies into automated actions and guardrails
  3. Guardrails: Preventing waste, reducing manual work, and enabling scalable FinOps processes
• Key benefits of Automated Governance:
  • Preventing waste by cutting it off at the source before it accumulates
  • Reducing manual work by automating policy enforcement
  • Enabling scalable FinOps as cloud usage grows

AI-driven FinOps

• AI provides value in three key areas for FinOps:
  1. Guidance: AI-powered assistants can help users navigate the complexities of the cloud and find relevant data and information more easily
  2. Efficiency: AI can automate and accelerate tasks like budget updates, freeing up time for FinOps practitioners
  3. Governance: AI can be used to create and orchestrate cloud governance policies, empowering non-technical users to implement guardrails
• Example: Using AI to automatically create a policy to delete unattached EBS volumes after 7 days, without requiring manual coding

Beyond Public Cloud

• FinOps is expanding beyond just public cloud spend, encompassing all technology investments:
  • SaaS tools
  • Data center costs
  • Licensing
  • Generative AI
• Gaining visibility into the total technology spend enables:
  • Holistic cost governance and optimization
  • Better business decision-making based on total cost of ownership

Key Takeaways

• Adopt FinOps+ by identifying specific use cases and next steps for your organization, such as:
  • Integrating SaaS tools into your FinOps dashboard
  • Automating a policy you've been wanting to implement
• Provide feedback to refine and improve the FinOps+ framework
• Engage with Kion to explore FinOps+ use cases and implementation details