AWS Cloud Cost Optimization News & Updates

Welcome the AWS FinOps & Cloud Cost Optimization updates.

Every week, we’ll update this page with all the news that can help you do cloud cost optimization in AWS.

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