In partnership with
Just before the FinOps XE happening in Barcelona (Looking forward to seeing you there!), FOCUS got an update that is extremely important
What also happened this week:
AWS, GCP & Azure Q3 Results
Optimize with Governance
AWS to Cloudflare Migration saves +80%
Mention of Honour: FinOps XE Barcelona
Quick Wins with tons of updates from the community and providers
Professional Spotlight with Spanish GreenOps touch.
Everyone is preparing for what’s going to come on FinOps XE.
Action Items: Read today’s newsletter, and let me know if you want your content reshared on FinOps Weekly and SpainClouds (Spanish Translation)
Collaborate with FinOps Weekly
FOCUS
What 1.1 Means for FOCUS
The FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) version 1.1 has been released. This update brings new features to help companies better manage their cloud costs. FOCUS allows companies to combine billing data from different cloud providers into one standard format. This makes it easier to analyze spending across multiple cloud services.
Key changes in version 1.1:
New data fields for tracking capacity reservations and commitment discounts
More detailed service categories to break down costs
Additional information about pricing and usage of cloud resources
Better support for processing billing data
Many major cloud providers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft now offer FOCUS-formatted billing data. Software companies are also starting to support FOCUS in their tools. The FOCUS team plans to release updates about twice a year. The next version will add support for analyzing costs from software-as-a-service (SaaS) products.
One of the most valuable assets we have in the FinOps ecosystem. Start learning it now and get use to it. It’s not going anywhere 😉
In partnership with FinOut
Cloud Cost Chaos: How Savings Turn Into Showback Nightmares
As cloud environments expand, managing costs becomes even more challenging, with savings both a solution and a problem.
AWS’s Reserved Instances, Spot Instances, and Savings Plans aim to simplify optimization but often complicate cost control.
One major hurdle? Showback. It’s about allocating costs transparently to the right teams, but with AWS applying discounts inconsistently, costs get misaligned, savings are missed, and billing becomes unpredictable.
In my latest article, we’ll dive into the key issues FinOps teams face with AWS showback—misaligned discounts, manual adjustments, and more.
Cloud Providers
Cloud Race Q3 Update: Google Grows Fastest, AWS Tops Revenue
Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud shared their financial results for the third quarter of 2024. These three companies make up 64% of the $84 billion cloud computing market. Let’s look at how they performed:
Revenue and Growth:
AWS made $27.5 billion
Microsoft’s cloud division made $24.1 billion
Google Cloud made $11.4 billion
Google Cloud grew the fastest at 35%
Microsoft grew by 20%
AWS grew by 19%
Market Share:
AWS leads with 31%
Microsoft has 20%
Google Cloud has 12%
Profits:
Microsoft’s cloud division made $10.5 billion
AWS made $10.4 billion
Google Cloud made $1.9 billion
These results show that the cloud computing market is still growing. Each company has its strengths, but they’re all doing well in this important tech area.
Cloud Governance
Optimize with Governance
Cloud cost optimization can become a never-ending cycle. Many companies keep fixing cost issues after each monthly bill, but the problems keep coming back.
This happens because they’re only fixing the symptoms, not the real cause. Instead of constantly trying to reduce costs, it’s better to set up rules for using the cloud. This is called cloud governance.
Cloud governance means creating processes and policies that guide how people use cloud resources. These policies are usually set up using code and run automatically. The main goal is to make sure cloud use matches what the business actually needs. This helps avoid waste without limiting creativity. To set up good cloud governance:
Get input from different teams about their needs and requirements.
Have the FinOps team gather all this information.
Create cloud policies based on these requirements.
Have the technical team put these policies into code.
Apply these policies to the cloud infrastructure.
By setting up smart cloud governance, companies can better control their cloud costs and align cloud use with business value
Cost Optimization
Baselime moves to Cloudflare, saving 80% in Cloud Costs
Baselime, an observability platform, recently moved from AWS to Cloudflare. This change led to big improvements in how they work and how much they spend.Before the move, Baselime used many different AWS services.
After moving to Cloudflare, Baselime’s daily costs dropped from $1,940 to $325. This means they now save 83% on their yearly cloud costs. The new setup uses Cloudflare Workers, which run code all over the world. Moving to Cloudflare took less than three months. The team did this step by step, making sure nothing broke along the way.
Together with Turbo360
Overcoming ACM Limitations: Smarter Cloud Cost Management (Whitepaper)
Managing cloud costs can be unpredictable, challenging, and expensive, making traditional methods fall short.
Azure Cost Management (ACM) offers tools like calculators and Azure Advisor but lacks the user-friendliness and flexibility needed for true cost optimization.
But wait, this whitepaper has all the answers you need:
The limitations of ACM in managing cloud costs
Why a third-party solution is essential for better visibility
How Turbo360’s user-centric approach simplifies cost management
Key areas where Turbo360 drives the most value, empowering teams to reduce expenses effectively
🎖️ Mention of Honour
FinOps XE Barcelona 2024
The event is coming next week!
Looking forward to seeing everyone there for those that could make. Let’s enjoy these 4 days, and everything the ecosystem has for us.
Here’s a list of recommended talks by Attribute, with great stuff. But please download the FinOps XE Agenda app and make your schedule.
Join our Telegram and ping us to meet over there!
🏆 Quick Wins
Announcements
AWS has updated its Well-Architected Framework.The update includes 14 new best practices. The Reliability Pillar has been improved for the first time since 2022.
Amazon CloudWatch now monitors EBS volumes exceeding provisioned performance
Gitpod ditches Kubernetes for development environments.
Articles & Podcasts
Rightsizing – show, don’t tell
Beyond Million Dollar Lines of Code: Practical Strategies for Engineering Cost-Effective Cloud Systems
Carlsberg Group increases cloud efficiency with FinOps and Azure solutions
How to do FinOps in a 100,000+ Employee Company with Narciso Cerezo (BBVA)
Professional Spotlight
Ferran Grau
GreenOps with Spanish Quality
It was great to meet Ferran at AWS Summit and listen to his talk. He’s also giving one at FinOps XE next week so please save it to your agenda if you are interested in GreenOps related topics!
That’s all for this week. See you next Sunday!
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