AWS Cloud Cost Optimization News & AWS FinOps Updates
Welcome the AWS FinOps Updates & Cloud Cost Optimization news.
Every week, we’ll update this page with all the news that can help you do cloud cost optimization & FinOps in AWS.
october 25, 2025
Cut Microsoft licensing bills by tweaking EC2 vCPU options
Specifically, Amazon EC2 customers can customize the number of vCPUs and disable hyperthreading on Windows Server and SQL Server license‑included instances. This change means you can reduce the vCPU count that Microsoft bills against while keeping the instance’s memory and IOPS unchanged.
For example, an r7i.8xlarge running Windows and SQL Server normally exposes 32 vCPUs; by turning off hyperthreading you can drop that to 16 vCPUs while retaining 256 GiB memory and 40,000 IOPS, effectively cutting the licensing cost in half.
Because this works in all commercial AWS Regions and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, you can apply it broadly to database workloads that need high memory and I/O but not as many vCPUs. The direct benefit: immediate Microsoft licensing cost savings without sacrificing the memory or storage performance your workloads require.
See and optimize EC2 capacity across accounts — one dashboard
This new capability gives you a single interface with dashboards and charts that show current capacity, historical usage trends, and optimization opportunities across On‑Demand, Spot, and Capacity Reservation footprints.
Additionally, EC2 Capacity Manager offers drill‑downs, APIs, exportable data, and workflows to act on optimizations—so you can go from insight to execution.
Because it’s enabled by default at no additional cost in all commercial AWS Regions, the practical benefit is faster, consolidated visibility for capacity planning and FinOps-driven decisions, without needing extra tooling or spend.
Match Marketplace charges to PO line items for cleaner invoices
You can now attach a purchase order line number to Marketplace transactions during procurement or post‑procurement for future charges, and see the PO + PO line number on invoices in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console.
This capability is supported in all AWS Regions where AWS Marketplace is available, and it streamlines matching Marketplace invoices to your procurement system.
The benefit here is obvious for finance teams: cleaner cost allocation, faster invoice processing, and fewer manual reconciliations.
AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool now includes Scope 3 emissions
The CCFT’s methodology v3.0.0 adds three Scope 3 areas: fuel‑ and energy‑related activities (upstream fuels and electricity including transmission and distribution losses), IT hardware (cradle‑to‑gate LCA for devices and transport), and buildings and equipment (whole building life cycle assessment).
Importantly, AWS amortizes those embodied emissions over asset service life—six years for IT hardware and 50 years for buildings—so monthly customer allocations reflect fair lifetime distribution. AWS also recalculated historical data back to January 2022 and had the methodology independently verified.
You can access these expanded emissions in the Billing console under the Customer Carbon Footprint Tool, export CSVs, and choose market‑based method (MBM) or location‑based method (LBM) calculations. The direct benefit for FinOps: more complete, auditable emissions visibility (including Scope 3) to tie sustainability metrics to cost and operational decisions.
Use tags to control who sees database performance metrics
Previously, instance tags didn’t affect access to Performance Insights metrics, forcing manual, resource‑by‑resource permission setup. Now instance tags are evaluated automatically for authorizing database and per‑query metrics, so you can write IAM policies using tag‑based conditions.
As a result, you can implement access controls across logical groupings (team, project, environment) without managing permissions per database.
In practice this reduces operational overhead and improves governance consistency—beneficial for FinOps teams that rely on secure, role‑based visibility into database performance and cost drivers.
Bundle up to 10 synthetic checks into a single canary
Multi‑check blueprints cover common monitoring tasks—HTTP endpoints (with various auth methods), DNS validation, SSL certificate monitoring, and TCP port checks—and integrate with AWS Secrets Manager for credentials. Each step returns detailed assertions on status codes, latency, headers, and body content.
Because you can bundle multiple checks into one canary and get step‑by‑step results in the existing Synthetics console, you avoid writing separate custom scripts and reduce the number of canaries you run.
That translates to lower monitoring cost and faster setup time for end‑to‑end health checks, which helps FinOps balance observability needs against monitoring spend.
Faster CUR queries and a fix for AEMX ingress bytes filtering
The release specifically speeds up the main Cost and Usage Report (CUR) query when working with very large account usage datasets, so dashboards that previously ran slowly should respond faster.
Additionally, a bug in the AEMX ingress bytes filter was corrected, improving the accuracy of that KPI’s filtering.
For FinOps teams, the benefit is quicker access to cost and usage reports at scale and more accurate KPI filtering for data‑in metrics, which helps reduce analysis time and surface correct savings opportunities sooner.
october 18, 2025
AWS announces Service Lifecycle changes that could affect your migration and budget plans
AWS published availability and lifecycle changes for a set of services and features — see the full update here. AWS grouped the changes into three lifecycle categories: services and capabilities moving to Maintenance, services entering Sunset (with an announced end-of-operations/support timeline), and services that have reached End of Support.
Additionally, AWS notes services moving to Maintenance will no longer be accessible to new customers starting Nov 7, 2025, while Sunset timelines are typically about 12 months — and they list specific services in each category (for example, Amazon Cloud Directory, Amazon Glacier, Amazon S3 Object Lambda and others moving to Maintenance; Amazon FinSpace and AWS Proton entering Sunset).
For FinOps teams, this matters because these lifecycle moves affect planning windows, migration timelines, and potential cost impacts;
New FinOps training: “Cloud Financial Management: FinOps for GenAI” and refreshed courses — free on Skill Builder
AWS updated its Cloud Financial Management digital training and added a new one-hour “FinOps for Generative AI” course — read the blog. AWS refreshed four existing CFM courses and added a new fifth course focused on generative AI cost management. The new course, “Cloud Financial Management: FinOps for Generative AI,” covers practical guidance for cost visibility, control, budgeting, and optimization for generative AI workloads and includes content on Amazon Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, Amazon EC2 for GenAI, Amazon Q, and related services.
Also, all five one-hour courses are free on AWS Skill Builder and are aimed at both business and technical roles; AWS recommends starting with the fundamentals (Parts I & II) before moving to the more technical optimization courses.
Instant Regional resource search via AWS Resource Explorer — faster inventory for cost and governance
AWS now provides immediate resource discovery within a Region via AWS Resource Explorer — learn more here. AWS Resource Explorer now gives immediate access to resource search in all accounts within a Region without you having to activate Resource Explorer first. Minimal permissions include the managed policies AWS Resource Explorer Read Only Access or AWS Read Only Access, and you can search from the Resource Explorer console, Unified Search, and AWS CLI/SDKs.
Furthermore, to search the full inventory (historical backfill and automatic updates) you’ll need to complete Resource Explorer setup which requires creating a Service-Linked Role; you can also enable cross-Region search with one click in the Console or via the CreateResourceExplorerSetup API call.
AWS Config expands coverage with three new resource types for broader compliance and tracking
AWS announced that AWS Config now supports three additional resource types — full details here. The newly supported resource types are AWS::ApiGatewayV2::Integration, AWS::CloudTrail::EventDataStore, and AWS::Config::StoredQuery, and they’re available in all Regions where those resources exist. If you have recording enabled for all resource types, AWS Config will automatically start tracking these additions; they’re also available to use in Config rules and aggregators.
Extended Support Cost Projection dashboard adds ElastiCache support — update required
The Cloud Intelligence Dashboards Framework released v4.0.3 to add Elasticache support for the Extended Support Cost Projection dashboard — see the changelog. v4.0.3 adds an Extended Support ElastiCache sheet so you can estimate extended-support costs for Elasticache in addition to RDS and EKS. Important: this release requires data collection version 3.2.0+ and a forced recursive update, and you’ll be prompted to confirm the recursive update so the new dataset and Athena view get deployed.
For FinOps teams, the change improves forecasting for extended-support costs across more services, enabling better budgeting and migration planning for legacy engine versions.
New EC2 M8a instances: up to 30% better performance and improved price-performance
AWS announced general availability of Amazon EC2 M8a instances — see the announcement summary. M8a instances run on 5th Gen AMD EPYC (up to 4.5 GHz) and deliver up to 30% higher performance and up to 19% better price-performance versus M7a, with 45% more memory bandwidth and 12 sizes (including two bare-metal options). They’re SAP-certified and built on the Nitro system, and AWS highlights specific benchmark gains (for example, GroovyJVM and Cassandra improvements).
Additionally, M8a is available in US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Spain), and you can buy them on On-Demand, via Savings Plans, or Spot.
Amazon WorkSpaces Core Managed Instances expands to five more Regions
AWS announced WorkSpaces Core Managed Instances availability in five additional Regions — read the update. WorkSpaces Core Managed Instances are now available in US East (Ohio), Asia Pacific (Malaysia), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Middle East (UAE), and Europe (Spain); partners include Citrix, Workspot, Leostream, and Dizzion. Managed Instances provision resources in your AWS account while the Core partner handles lifecycle and session management for persistent and non-persistent desktops.
Also, you can apply existing discounts and Savings Plans, and use On-Demand Capacity Reservations (ODCRs), while paying standard compute plus an hourly WorkSpaces Core fee.
october 11, 2025
Amazon Q Developer can now answer pricing and cost-estimate questions
Amazon Q Developer now helps customers understand service prices and estimate workload costs. Amazon Q Developer added pricing and cost estimation capabilities that let you ask natural language questions about AWS prices, availability, and attributes. It retrieves data from the AWS Price List APIs to answer queries like estimates for sending a million notifications, RDS extended support costs, or cost differences between load balancer types.
This is available from the Amazon Q chat panel in the AWS Management Console and in Slack/Teams. The capability is hosted in US East (N. Virginia) and covers pricing across commercial AWS Regions (excluding China and GovCloud), making early cost modeling and cost/performance tradeoffs faster and more accessible.
AWS Marketplace supports EUR/GBP/AUD/JPY for usage-based private offers
AWS Marketplace now supports new currencies (EUR, GBP, AUD, JPY) for usage-based private offers. Sellers can now create usage‑based private offers in these four currencies and receive disbursements in the chosen currency. That removes foreign‑exchange risk and simplifies procurement for buyers and sellers. It works across pricing models (contract+consumption, usage‑based pay‑as‑you‑go, contract‑only).
For Channel Partner Private Offers (CPPO) the seller, channel partner, and buyer must transact in the same currency. Public Marketplace offers remain in USD. Sellers need to update banking and currency preferences in the Marketplace Management Portal to use this globally available feature.
AWS Marketplace increases pricing dimensions
AWS Marketplace expanded pricing dimension capabilities for sellers. Sellers can now define up to 200 pricing dimensions (up from 24) for contract and usage‑based pricing, new SaaS dimensions are immediately usable, and the 90‑day price‑update restriction no longer applies to dimensions without active subscriptions. That lets sellers represent complex enterprise pricing (features, user types, consumption metrics) on Marketplace without simplifying or reworking external pricing models.
These enhancements are available in all AWS Regions where Marketplace is supported and help reduce friction when bringing sophisticated commercial software offers onto AWS.
Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion adds batch AI inference
AWS just added batch AI inference support to Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion. OpenSearch Ingestion pipelines can now run asynchronous batch AI inference to enrich and ingest large datasets (for example, generating up to billions of vector embeddings). Previously you could only use real‑time AI connectors; batch inference is optimized for high throughput and cost efficiency for offline enrichment.
You can use the same AI connectors (Amazon Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, and third‑party services) in batch mode. This makes large‑scale embedding generation, translations, predictions, and recommendation enrichment much more practical and cheaper than streaming everything in real time. It’s available in all regions that support OpenSearch Ingestion and 2.17+ domains.
Self-service invoice correction
AWS just launched a self-service invoice correction feature. You can now correct invoice attributes (purchase order numbers, legal business name, addresses) directly from the AWS Billing and Cost Management console using a guided workflow and receive corrected invoices instantly. That replaces opening a support ticket and waiting for manual corrections.
This reduces administrative delays and helps teams close books faster. The feature is generally available in all AWS Regions except GovCloud (US) and the China Regions (Beijing, Ningxia).
Automatic quota management for AWS Service Quotas
AWS just rolled out automatic quota management for Service Quotas. Automatic quota management monitors your quota usage and notifies you before you run out of allocated quotas supported in Service Quotas. That gives you proactive visibility so apps aren’t unexpectedly blocked by exhausted quotas.
You can configure notification channels (email, SMS, or Slack) via the Service Quotas console or API, see notifications in AWS Health, and subscribe to relevant CloudTrail events to trigger automation workflows. The feature is available at no additional cost in all AWS commercial regions.
New compute-optimized EC2 C8i and C8i-flex instances
AWS just rolled out new compute optimized Amazon EC2 C8i and C8i-flex instances. These instances are powered by AWS‑exclusive custom Intel Xeon 6 processors and deliver the highest performance and fastest memory bandwidth among comparable Intel processors in the cloud. AWS calls out up to 15% better price-performance and 2.5x more memory bandwidth versus previous Intel-based instances, and up to 20% better performance than the C7i family for many workloads.
AWS measured workload improvements too: up to 60% faster for NGINX web apps, up to 40% faster for AI recommendation models, and 35% faster for Memcached stores compared to C7i/C7i‑flex. That’s useful if you’re optimizing cost-per-throughput for web, caching, or recommendation workloads.
There are two lines: C8i‑flex (common sizes from large to 16xlarge, aimed at workloads that don’t fully utilize all CPU) and C8i (13 sizes including two bare‑metal sizes and a new 96xlarge for the biggest apps). They’re available today in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Spain). You can buy them via Savings Plans, On‑Demand, or Spot.
Amazon EKS and EKS Distro support Kubernetes 1.34
AWS now supports Kubernetes version 1.34 on Amazon EKS and EKS Distro. You can create new clusters or upgrade existing clusters to Kubernetes v1.34 via the EKS console, eksctl, or your IaC tooling. v1.34 brings features like projected service account tokens for kubelet image credential providers (improves security for image pulls), pod‑level resource requests/limits to simplify multi‑container resource management, and Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) prioritized alternatives for better device scheduling.
EKS supports v1.34 in all AWS Regions where EKS is available, including GovCloud (US). EKS Distro v1.34 builds are published via ECR Public Gallery and GitHub, and AWS recommends using EKS cluster insights to check upgrade readiness and catch issues before rolling upgrades.
october 4, 2025
Get 4x Performance from EBS gp3 Volumes
Amazon EBS has massively increased the limits for its General Purpose (gp3) volumes, boosting max size to 64 TiB and IOPS up to 80,000. This expansion allows for significant architectural simplification by consolidating multiple striped volumes into one.
For FinOps teams, this directly reduces operational complexity and management overhead. This is especially beneficial for containerized applications or any workload where you can now use a single, powerful volume instead of managing several smaller ones.
A New Way to Run Containers with ECS Managed Instances
AWS has launched Amazon ECS Managed Instances, a new fully managed compute option designed to eliminate infrastructure overhead. The service automatically provisions, scales, and patches the most optimal EC2 instances for your containers.
This is a key update for TCO reduction, as AWS is explicitly taking over the cost optimization decisions. It targets the “Kubernetes tax” by handling the complex and costly parts of infrastructure management for you.
Consolidate Your Spend with Multi-Org Billing Views
A major governance hurdle has been cleared, as the AWS Billing View now supports cost management data from multiple AWS Organizations. This allows a single account to manage and view spend across separate business units or subsidiaries.
This is a game-changer for large FinOps teams, enabling the creation of consolidated views in Cost Explorer. You can now set budgets and monitor spending patterns across the entire enterprise portfolio from one place.
Get More Rightsizing Recommendations from Compute Optimizer
AWS Compute Optimizer has expanded its support to include 99 new Amazon EC2 instance types. This includes the latest instance families, giving you more up-to-date recommendations for optimizing your workloads.
With broader instance coverage, you get more accurate and relevant rightsizing recommendations. This directly translates to more opportunities to reduce costs and improve performance across your EC2 fleet.
Save on Your Db2 Databases with Reserved Instances
Amazon RDS for Db2 now offers Reserved Instances (RIs), allowing you to save up to 42% compared to on-demand pricing. You can commit to a one or three-year term for a specific instance class and region.
This provides a straightforward way to reduce costs for your predictable, long-running Db2 database workloads. RIs are a fundamental FinOps practice for optimizing spend on stable database usage.
Improve Governance with Allowed AMI Settings for EC2
Amazon EC2 now has a new account-level setting to define a list of allowed AMIs that can be used to launch instances. This allows administrators to enforce the use of standardized, patched, and compliant images across the organization.
This is a powerful governance tool for controlling costs and security. By preventing the use of unapproved or expensive Marketplace AMIs, you can reduce security risks and avoid unexpected software licensing fees.
September 27, 2025
Simplify Your RDS Disaster Recovery and Save Costs
Amazon RDS and Aurora now support single-step, cross-region and cross-account snapshot copies. This new feature allows you to copy snapshots directly to another region or account, replacing the previous two-step process.
For FinOps, this simplifies disaster recovery strategies and can save money by eliminating the need for an intermediate snapshot copy. It helps you meet recovery objectives while reducing the operational overhead and cost of managing backups.
Get More Control Over EC2 Auto Scaling Refreshes
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now supports the forced cancellation of instance refreshes. This gives you the ability to immediately stop an ongoing instance refresh without waiting for in-progress terminations to complete.
This provides greater control during emergency situations or when a deployment needs to be aborted quickly. It helps prevent unintended changes from rolling out, giving you a rapid way to halt updates and control your environment.
Optimize SageMaker Costs with Managed Autoscaling
Amazon SageMaker HyperPod now supports managed node autoscaling using Karpenter. This feature allows your clusters to scale automatically based on training and inference demands.
This removes the operational overhead of managing autoscaling yourself and provides significant cost optimization. It enables just-in-time provisioning and the ability to scale down to zero nodes during idle periods.
Create More Precise Guardrails with Enhanced SCPs
AWS Organizations now supports the full IAM policy language for Service Control Policies (SCPs). This allows SCPs to use advanced features like conditions, individual resource ARNs, and the NotAction element.
This enhancement lets you create more precise and concise permission guardrails across your organization. It gives you greater flexibility to implement sophisticated security and governance policies to control costs and access.
A Cost-Effective Option for OpenSearch Vector Storage
Amazon OpenSearch Serverless now supports disk-optimized vectors, a new storage option for vector search operations. This option maintains high accuracy while potentially having slightly higher latency than memory-optimized vectors.
This is ideal for use cases like semantic search or recommendation systems where sub-millisecond response times are not critical. It provides a more cost-effective way to store and search large vector datasets.
Centralize Your Observability Data in OpenSearch
Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion now supports cross-account ingestion for push-based sources like HTTP and OpenTelemetry. This simplifies centralizing observability and analytics workflows for organizations with multiple AWS accounts.
This capability removes the reliance on more complex configurations like VPC peering or AWS Transit Gateway. It streamlines the process of consolidating logs and metrics, making your analytics setup more efficient.
Set Custom Time Periods in AWS Budgets
AWS Budgets has introduced the ability to create budgets for custom time periods. You can now set start and end dates that align with your specific financial tracking needs, such as a project timeline or a fiscal quarter.
This provides more flexibility beyond the standard monthly, quarterly, or annual budget cycles. It allows FinOps teams to track spending against specific, time-bound initiatives more accurately.
September 21, 2025
Prevent Accidental S3 Deletions with Conditional Support
Amazon S3 now supports conditional deletes, helping to prevent accidental data loss in high-concurrency environments. This works by requiring an object’s ETag value to match before a delete request will succeed.
For FinOps, this feature minimizes the risk of unintended data loss that could lead to costly recovery efforts. Enforcing conditional deletes via bucket policies boosts data integrity and reduces operational risk, saving on potential remediation costs.
Better Price-Performance with New R8i Instances
Amazon EC2 R8i and R8i-flex instances, powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors, are now available in more regions. These instances offer up to 15% better price-performance compared to previous generations for memory-intensive workloads.
This is a significant cost optimization opportunity, especially with R8i-flex instances for apps that don’t fully use all compute resources. You can get better performance for databases and AI models, making your cloud spend more efficient.
Easily Centralize Your CloudWatch Logs
Amazon CloudWatch now offers cross-account and cross-region log centralization, allowing you to copy logs into a single destination account. The feature integrates with AWS Organizations and enriches logs with source information.
This is a big win for operations as it simplifies log management and reduces the costs of running custom solutions. Customers can centralize one copy of their logs for free, helping control costs for centralized visibility.
Fine-Tune Your S3 Backups with Selective Metadata
You can now choose whether to include Access Control Lists (ACLs) and ObjectTags when backing up S3 buckets with AWS Backup. Previously, this metadata was always included by default for all objects.
This capability helps you customize your backup strategy to reduce storage costs by only including necessary metadata. Optimizing your backup approach ensures more efficient resource use and better control over expenses.
Troubleshoot Prometheus with CloudWatch Collector Logs
The Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus collector now supports sending logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs. This provides valuable context for troubleshooting the metric collection and ingestion process.
This enhanced visibility helps teams resolve operational issues more quickly, reducing time spent on troubleshooting. It ensures your monitoring infrastructure runs efficiently, avoiding potential costs from undetected problems.
Save Costs on Graphics Apps with Fractional GPUs
Amazon AppStream 2.0 now supports Graphics G6 instances with fractionalized GPU sizes, built on the EC2 G6 family. This allows users to utilize only the GPU resources they need, rather than provisioning a full instance.
This offers significant cost savings by avoiding over-provisioning and ensuring you only pay for the capacity you require. Organizations can benefit from better resource optimization, leading to reduced overall expenses.
September 14th, 2025
Better Price-Performance for ElastiCache with Graviton3
Amazon ElastiCache has expanded its support for Graviton3-based M7g and R7g nodes to more regions. These nodes offer a significant price-performance improvement over the previous Graviton2 generation.
For FinOps, this is a clear opportunity for optimization. Migrating to these nodes can yield up to a 28% increase in throughput and a 21% improvement in P99 latency, delivering more performance for your spend.
Track and Manage Your AMI Usage in EC2
A new feature in Amazon EC2 called AMI Usage is now available to help you monitor your Amazon Machine Images. This provides capabilities to track AMI consumption across your accounts and identify which resources are dependent on a specific AMI.
This gives you much better oversight of your AMI lifecycle. It helps you manage utilization, identify unused AMIs for cleanup, and optimize costs associated with your custom images.
Get Free WAF Log Ingestion with CloudWatch
AWS WAF now includes 500 MB of CloudWatch Logs Vended Logs Ingestion at no extra cost for every 1 million WAF requests processed. This is a nice cost-saving measure for security logging.
This update helps you manage WAF logging costs more effectively. It allows you to maintain comprehensive security visibility for analysis and compliance without incurring extra charges for a baseline level of log ingestion.
Optimize Costs with Configurable Compute in AWS Clean Rooms
AWS Clean Rooms now supports configurable compute sizes for PySpark jobs. This allows customers to specify the instance type and cluster size for their data analysis at runtime.
This flexibility is great for cost optimization. You can now right-size your compute resources to match the scale and performance needs of each specific job, avoiding over-provisioning for smaller tasks.
Track IAM Policy Tags with AWS Config
AWS Config will now track resource tags for IAM policy resource types. This enhances the metadata available for assessing, auditing, and evaluating your IAM configurations.
This is particularly useful for governance and cost allocation. It allows you to create more granular AWS Config rules that evaluate resources based on their tags, improving your ability to manage compliance and track costs.
Neptune Analytics Now Supports NetworkX
For those working with graph analytics, Amazon Neptune Analytics now integrates with NetworkX as a graph store. This allows developers to use familiar NetworkX APIs for graph analysis.
This can be more cost-effective for large-scale computations. It lets you offload heavy graph algorithm workloads to Neptune’s scalable engine without needing to refactor your code.
September 7th, 2025
More Granular Cost Allocation for EKS
AWS has introduced split cost allocation data for Amazon EKS. This feature is for shared EC2 instances that have multiple accelerators like GPUs from NVIDIA or AMD.
This provides much more accurate cost visibility for specific machine learning workloads. It helps FinOps teams and engineers understand the true cost of running their models on shared hardware.
Run RDS for Oracle on Bare Metal Instances
Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports deployment on bare metal instances. This gives applications direct access to the underlying server’s processor and memory without a hypervisor.
This option is for specialized, high-performance workloads that need non-virtualized environments. For FinOps, this is particularly interesting as it can be a key strategy for reducing costs in “bring-your-own-license” (BYOL) scenarios for Oracle.
Create Smarter Alarms with Multiple CloudWatch Metrics
You can now create Amazon CloudWatch alarms based on queries of multiple metrics. This allows you to build a single alarm using a math expression that combines several different metrics.
This is useful for creating more sophisticated cost and performance alarms. For example, you can now alert when CPU usage goes up while transaction count goes down, indicating potential inefficiency.
Analyze Longer Trends in CloudWatch Metrics
The Amazon CloudWatch console now allows you to query metrics data over a two-week period in a single query. This extends the previous time range available for on-the-fly analysis.
This change simplifies trend analysis and troubleshooting over longer periods. It makes it easier to investigate performance and cost patterns without needing to run and combine multiple queries.
Track Your Prometheus Usage and Quotas More Easily
Usage and quotas for Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus are now visible in AWS Service Quotas. This data is also available as CloudWatch usage metrics.
Proactively tracking usage against service quotas helps prevent unexpected service disruptions. This visibility allows teams to manage their monitoring resources and request limit increases before hitting a ceiling.
August 31th, 2025
Amazon Bedrock Now Available in GovCloud
Here’s an important update for the public sector. Amazon Bedrock is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) region.
This allows U.S. government agencies and their partners to build and scale generative AI applications using Bedrock’s powerful models in a secure and compliant environment.
For FinOps teams in government, this unlocks new possibilities for innovation while adhering to strict regulatory requirements.
Get Deeper Insights with Custom Application Metrics
Good news for application monitoring. Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals now lets you create custom metrics.
This means you can now track specific business or operational data that is unique to your applications, right alongside standard performance metrics.
This is great for FinOps because it allows you to correlate your application’s business value directly with its operational costs, leading to smarter optimization decisions.
New, Cost-Effective EC2 Instances are Here
AWS has launched new general-purpose instances. Amazon EC2 M8i and M8i-Flex instances are now generally available.
The M8i instances offer a solid balance of compute, memory, and networking. The M8i-Flex instances are particularly interesting for FinOps, as they are designed for workloads that don’t need full CPU power all the time, offering a lower-cost option.
This is a classic right-sizing opportunity, allowing you to choose the most cost-effective instance for your general-purpose workloads.
Better Price-Performance for Your Search Workloads
Here’s a great way to save money on search. Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports I8g instances.
These instances are powered by AWS Graviton processors and are designed to offer better price-performance for search and indexing workloads compared to similar x86-based instances.
If you’re running OpenSearch, switching to these new Graviton-based instances could be a quick and easy way to reduce your costs.
A Dedicated MCP Server for Your Billing Data
This is an interesting update for large organizations. AWS Billing and Cost Management has introduced a dedicated MCP server.
This provides a more robust and scalable way to access and manage your billing data using AI, especially if you have a huge number of member accounts.
There’s a lot of talking about this announcement due to the risks of inaccuracy AI can incur on such critical information.
Power Up Your AI Training with New GPUs
For teams working on the cutting edge of AI, you can now use the powerful P5 instances, with NVIDIA H100 GPUs, for your SageMaker training and processing jobs.
These instances are built for high-performance, large-scale AI and machine learning workloads.
While they are powerful, the key for FinOps is to ensure they are used efficiently. Make sure your teams are monitoring utilization closely to get the full value from these top-tier resources.
August 24th, 2025
Get Personalized Savings Tips on Your AWS Billing Homepage
Here’s a great new feature. The AWS Billing and Cost Management console homepage now has a “Recommended actions” widget.
This new section gives you a quick, personalized list of the most impactful cost-saving opportunities for your accounts, right when you log in.
It’s a nice way to make sure you never miss a chance to optimize your spend, from terminating idle resources to purchasing Savings Plans.
Save Money with Smarter Instance Choices in AWS Batch
This is a cool cost-saving update. AWS Batch can now automatically select from a wider range of EC2 instance types for your jobs, not just the latest generation.
This means Batch can choose an older, cheaper instance type if it’s a better fit for your workload’s needs.
It’s a simple, automatic way to lower your compute costs without having to manually figure out the most cost-effective instance for every job.
Customize Your AWS Billing and Cost Management Dashboard
Good news for dashboard fans. The AWS Billing and Cost Management console homepage is now a customizable dashboard with widgets.
You can now drag, drop, and resize different widgets to create a view that shows the cost and usage information that’s most important to you.
This is great for personalizing your FinOps workspace and keeping your key cost metrics front and center.
Big Savings for US Government Agencies on AWS
This is a huge deal for the public sector. The US General Services Administration (GSA) announced a new agreement with AWS that could save government agencies up to $1 billion.
This “OneGov” agreement simplifies how government agencies buy AWS services, offering better discounts and more standardized terms.
For FinOps teams in the public sector, this is a major win for procurement and long-term cost management.
August 17th, 2025
Better Sharing for Your Reserved EC2 Capacity
Here’s a great update for managing your EC2 commitments! You can now share targeted Capacity Reservations with accounts outside of your AWS Organization.
This is super useful if you work with partners or have complex account structures.
It gives you more flexibility to ensure your reserved capacity is always being used, which is key to avoiding waste and maximizing the value of your commitments.
Save Money on Your Creative Rendering Jobs
For creative studios, this is big news! AWS Deadline Cloud has introduced new cost-saving features for rendering workloads.
The platform now makes it easier to use Spot Instances for your rendering fleet, which can save you a ton of money.
It’s all about giving you more options to get your creative work done on a budget without sacrificing performance.
Right-Size Your AI Workloads with Single-GPU Instances
Good news for AI and machine learning teams! AWS has launched new Amazon EC2 P5 instances that have just a single GPU.
Before, you might have had to pay for a big, multi-GPU instance even if your workload didn’t need all that power.
Now, you can choose a more appropriately sized instance, which is a perfect example of right-sizing to avoid waste and only pay for what you need.
Find Your Resources Even Faster
It just got easier to search for your stuff! AWS Resource Explorer now lets you filter with multiple values for the same property.
For example, you can now search for all EC2 instances that are either a t3.micro OR a t3.small in a single query.
This is a great quality-of-life update for FinOps teams who are hunting for specific resources to tag, analyze, or clean up.
More Control Over Your Automation Runbooks
A nice update for automation fans! AWS Systems Manager Automation has enhanced its runbooks with more controls.
You can now add things like validation steps and interactive approvals right into your automation scripts.
This is great for creating safer, more reliable automations, like scripts that automatically shut down idle resources, which helps you save money without causing problems.
Track More Resources with AWS Config
Good news for governance! AWS Config has added support for a bunch of new resource types.
You can now track changes for services like AWS AppSync, Elemental MediaConnect, and Amazon Verified Permissions.
Keeping a close eye on how your resources are changing is a core part of good governance and helps FinOps teams understand how the environment is evolving.
Save Big on Serverless Batch Jobs
This is a huge cost-saving opportunity! AWS Batch on Fargate now supports Graviton-based Spot compute.
This is like a triple-win for FinOps: you get the cost savings of Spot Instances, the price-performance benefits of Graviton processors, and the operational ease of serverless with Fargate.
It’s a fantastic way to run your batch processing jobs for a fraction of the normal cost.
Better Budget Control for Your AI Training
For teams doing large-scale AI training, SageMaker HyperPod now offers more fine-grained control over how you allocate compute resources.
You can now set specific quotas for different teams or projects.
This is a great way to manage your budget and ensure that no single project accidentally runs up a huge bill on these powerful (and expensive) training resources.
Simplify Your Multi-Account Architecture
Here’s a helpful update for complex environments! AWS Cloud Map now supports cross-account service discovery.
This makes it much easier for services running in one AWS account to find and connect to services running in another.
By simplifying your architecture, you can reduce operational overhead and the complexity of managing your network, which often leads to cost savings.
August 10th, 2025
Forcibly Terminate Stuck EC2 Instances
Heads up! You can now force-terminate EC2 instances that are stuck in a “stopping” state.
This is a great fix for a frustrating problem. Sometimes an instance gets stuck and you can’t get rid of it, meaning you might still be paying for attached resources like EBS volumes.
Now, you can force it to terminate, helping you clean up resources and avoid unnecessary charges.
Better Security and Cost Control for S3
Here’s a great update for data governance! You can now use tags on S3 Access Points to control access to your data.
This lets you use attribute-based access control (ABAC) for your S3 buckets. For example, you can create a rule that only lets users from a specific project access the data tagged with their project name.
This not only improves security but also makes it easier to manage costs by ensuring data access is properly controlled.
Speed Up Your S3 Access and Save
Container users, take note! AWS has updated the Mountpoint for Amazon S3 CSI driver, which helps your containerized applications access S3 data much faster.
This is great for data-intensive workloads like machine learning training or big data analytics.
From a FinOps perspective, faster performance is a big win. When your jobs finish quicker, you use less compute time, which directly translates to cost savings.
Turn on VPC Flow Logs for Your Whole Org at Once
This is a huge time-saver for security and network teams! You can now enable VPC Flow Logs across your entire AWS Organization from a central account.
Instead of setting it up account by account, you can now do it all in one go.
This is fantastic for maintaining security compliance and also gives FinOps teams a complete view of network traffic costs across the whole organization.
Send Bigger Messages with SQS
Good news for developers! Amazon SQS now supports message payloads up to 1 MiB.
Before, you might have had to split larger messages or use S3 to store the payload, which added complexity and cost.
Now, you can send bigger messages directly, which can reduce the number of API calls you make and simplify your architecture, leading to cost savings.
Find Your Resources Faster Than Ever
It just got easier to find what you’re looking for! AWS Resource Explorer has added support for over 120 new resource types.
This means you can now search for even more of your AWS resources from one central place.
For FinOps, this is great for quickly finding untagged resources, identifying potential waste, or just getting a better handle on everything running in your accounts.
Get More Bang for Your Buck with Aurora Serverless v2
This is a nice performance boost! Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 now delivers up to 30% better performance for some workloads.
The improvements are focused on how the database handles transaction processing.
Better performance often means your application can handle more with the same resources, which is a great way to improve your cost-efficiency.
Better Cross-Account Cost Visibility in AWS Budgets
A great quality-of-life update for finance teams! AWS Budgets now allows users with billing permissions to see cost data from other accounts in the organization.
This makes it much easier for a central FinOps or finance team to monitor spending across the entire company without needing special access to every single account.
It streamlines the process of keeping an eye on the budget and catching potential overruns early.
August 3rd, 2025
A Cheaper Way to Run Your AI Training Jobs
This is a fantastic update for machine learning teams! AWS Batch now directly supports Amazon SageMaker training jobs.
Before, you might have had to manage these separately. Now, you can use AWS Batch to schedule your SageMaker training jobs in a more cost-effective way.
This lets you take advantage of things like Spot Instances for your training, which can dramatically lower the cost of developing your AI models.
Say Goodbye to Paying for Idle Databases
Great news for database users! Amazon DocumentDB, which is compatible with MongoDB, is now available in a serverless option.
This is a huge win for FinOps. Instead of paying for a database to be running 24/7, even when it’s not busy, the serverless model means you only pay for the capacity you actually use.
It automatically scales up and down based on your application’s needs, so you’re not wasting money on idle resources.
Don’t Need a Whole GPU? Now You Don’t Have to Buy One
This is a game-changer for smaller AI workloads! AWS has launched new G6f instances that offer “fractional GPUs”.
This means if your application needs some GPU power but not a full, high-end one, you can now provision just a slice of a GPU.
It’s the perfect way to get the performance you need for things like AI inference or graphics workstations without paying for a whole expensive GPU that you’re not fully using
25th of July, 2025
Tagging Your Resources Just Got More Powerful
Good news for governance fans! AWS Tag Policies now support wildcards in their rules.
This is a great update for enforcing consistent tagging across your organization. For example, you can now require that all EC2 instances have a tag key like project-*.
Better tagging means better cost allocation and reporting, which is a huge win for any FinOps team.
More Control Over Your Container Image Tags
Here’s a handy update for container users! Amazon ECR now lets you create exceptions for tag immutability.
Tag immutability is great because it stops people from accidentally overwriting an important image version, like production.
Now, you can grant specific users or roles permission to override this rule when needed. It’s a nice balance between strong governance and operational flexibility.
See Account Names in Cost Optimization Hub
This is a fantastic quality-of-life update! Cost Optimization Hub now shows account names next to account IDs.
Before, you might have had to look up what account 123456789012 was. Now, you’ll see “Production-Web-App” right there.
It’s a small change that makes it so much faster and easier to identify where your savings opportunities are and who you need to talk to.
Stop Your EC2 Instances Even Faster
Here’s an interesting one for operations! You can now choose to skip the OS-level shutdown when you stop or terminate an EC2 instance.
This can make the stop/terminate process much quicker, which is great for faster scaling actions.
While it might save a few fractions of a cent in billing, the real win here is the operational speed, especially in development or test environments.
19th of July, 2025
Your EKS Clusters Can Now Be HUGE
This is a massive scalability update! Amazon EKS now supports up to 100,000 worker nodes in a single cluster.
From a FinOps perspective, this is huge. It means you can consolidate more workloads into fewer, larger clusters.
This simplifies management and can lead to better resource utilization and cost allocation across a giant fleet of nodes, potentially reducing the overhead of managing lots of small clusters.
Cheaper to Manage Your S3 Objects
Good news for data management! AWS has significantly reduced the price for adding or changing the metadata on S3 objects that already exist.
Before, you paid the same as a full upload request, but now it’s much cheaper.
This is great if you need to tag or update metadata on large datasets for cost allocation or lifecycle management, as it lowers the cost of keeping your data well-organized.
Save Money on Your S3 Data Lakes
Another great update for S3 users! S3 Tables now have a feature that helps reduce the cost of data compaction.
Compaction is the process of merging many small files into fewer large ones to keep your queries running fast, but the process itself can be costly.
This update helps lower the operational overhead of maintaining an efficient and cost-effective data lake.
S3 is Getting into the AI Game with Vector Search
This is a big deal for AI developers! Amazon S3 is now previewing native support for storing and querying vectors.
This is huge for building AI apps that use vector embeddings for things like similarity searches.
From a FinOps angle, building this capability directly into S3 could be much more cost-effective than setting up and paying for a separate, specialized vector database.
AWS Cost Anomaly Detection Just Got Smarter
Time to trust your alerts more! AWS Cost Anomaly Detection has improved its machine learning models to be more accurate.
It’s now better at understanding your normal spending patterns, including things like seasonal spikes or gradual growth.
This means you’ll get fewer false alarms, so when you do get an alert, you can be more confident that it’s a real cost spike you need to investigate.
AWS Free Tier Gets a Makeover with Credits
The Free Tier is changing for the better! Instead of specific service limits, the AWS Free Tier will now give you a monthly credit of $75.
This is way more flexible. It allows you to try out a much wider variety of AWS services that fit within that credit amount.
It’s a great change for learning and experimenting with different tools without being locked into specific instance types.
Older Updates
Here are additional FinOps updates we made that involve information about AWS Cloud Cost Optimization updates
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