#FinOps Hub

[govindhtech]

FinOps Hub 2.0 Removes Cloud Waste With Smart Analytics

FinOps Hub 2.0

As Google Cloud customers used FinOps Hub 2.0 to optimise, business feedback increased. Businesses often lack clear insights into resource consumption, creating a blind spot. DevOps users have tools and utilisation indicators to identify waste.

The latest State of FinOps 2025 Report emphasises waste reduction and workload optimisation as FinOps priorities. If customers don't understand consumption, workloads and apps are hard to optimise. Why get a committed usage discount for computing cores you may not be using fully?

Using paid resources more efficiently is generally the easiest change customers can make. The improved FinOps Hub in 2025 focusses on cleaning up optimisation possibilities to help you find, highlight, and eliminate unnecessary spending.

Discover waste: FinOps Hub 2.0 now includes utilisation data to identify optimisation opportunities.

FinOps Hub 2.0 released at Google Cloud Next 2025 to highlight resource utilisation statistics to discover waste and take immediate action. Waste can be an overprovisioned virtual machine (VM) that is barely used at 5%, an underprovisioned GKE cluster that is running hot at 110% utilisation and may fail, or managed resources like Cloud Run instances that are configured suboptimally or never used.

FinOps users may now display the most expensive waste category in a single heatmap per service or AppHub application. FinOps Hub not only identifies waste but also delivers cost savings for Cloud Run, Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, and Cloud SQL.

Highlight waste: FinOps Hub uses Gemini Cloud Assist for optimisation and engineering.

The fact that it utilises Gemini Cloud Assist to speed up FinOps Hub's most time-consuming tasks may make this version a 2.0. Since January 2024 to January 2025, Gemini Cloud Assist has saved clients over 100,000 FinOps hours a year by providing customised cost reports and synthesising insights.

Google Cloud offered FinOps Hub two options to simplify and automate procedures using Gemini Cloud Assist. FinOps can now get embedded optimisation insights on the hub, such cost reports, so you don't have to find the optimisation "needle in the haystack". Second, Gemini Cloud Assist can now assemble and provide the most significant waste insights to your engineering teams for speedy fixes.

Eliminate waste: Give IT solution owners a NEW IAM role authorisation to view and act on optimisation opportunities.

Tech solution owners now have access to the billing panel, FinOps' most anticipated feature. This will display Gemini Cloud Assist and FinOps data for all projects in one window. With multi-project views in the billing console, you can give a department that only uses a subset of projects for their infrastructure access to FinOps Hub or cost reports without giving them more billing data while still letting them view all of their data in one view.

The new Project Billing Costs Manager IAM role (or granular permissions) provides multi-project views. Sign up for the private preview of these new permissions. With increased access limitations, you may fully utilise FinOps solutions across your firm.

“With clouds overgrown, like winter’s old grime, spring clean your servers, save dollars and time.” Clean your cloud infrastructure with FinOps Hub 2.0 and Gemini Cloud Assist this spring. Whatever, Gemini says so.

[centizen]

Revolutionizing Cloud Cost Management: AWS Unveils the Cost Optimization Hub

A game-changer for enterprise cloud financial management

At the forefront of cloud technology and financial efficiency, AWS made a significant announcement at the re:Invent 2023 conference that is set to transform how enterprises manage and optimize their cloud expenses. The introduction of the AWS Cost Optimization Hub marks a new era in cloud cost management, addressing a critical need for better expense control in cloud operations.

Introducing the AWS Cost Optimization Hub

AWS’s latest offering, the AWS Cost Optimization Hub, is a testament to their commitment to aiding enterprises in managing cloud costs more efficiently. This new feature within AWS Billing and Cost Management is a one-stop solution for identifying, filtering, aggregating, and quantifying savings in AWS cost optimization. What makes the Hub a standout is its ability to consolidate all cost-optimizing recommended actions from various AWS Cloud Financial Management (CFM) services, including AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Compute Optimizer.

Key features and benefits

Consolidated recommendations: The Hub amalgamates recommendations, considering customer-specific pricing and discounts, offering a unified view of cost optimization opportunities.

Diverse action types It provides diverse recommendations including stopping services, rightsizing, upgrading, Graviton migration, and purchasing savings plans or reserved instances.

Enhanced visibility: Enterprises gain clarity on estimated monthly savings for each recommendation and can filter these by various criteria such as AWS account and region.

Accessibility: The Hub is easily accessible through the AWS Billing and Cost Management Console and integrates with AWS CLI and SDKs for broader usability.

Aiding FinOps and infrastructure teams

This feature is particularly beneficial for FinOps and infrastructure management teams, providing them with valuable insights to understand and implement cost optimization strategies effectively.

Additional AWS innovations

AWS Free Tier Usage API: Alongside the Hub, AWS introduced a new API for enterprises to check their AWS Free Tier usage programmatically.

Data Exports feature: Another addition is the Data Exports feature in the Billing and Cost Management Console, allowing for customized exports of billing and cost management data.

The AWS Cost Optimization Hub, available globally at no additional cost, signifies AWS’s ongoing dedication to enhancing cloud cost management. This launch not only empowers enterprises in their financial operations but also reflects AWS’s leadership in providing innovative, customer-centric cloud solutions.

For personalized guidance and expertise in optimizing your cloud expenses, consider partnering with Centizen Cloud Consulting, where we tailor cloud solutions to fit your unique business needs.

[govindhtech]

5 Strategies to use FinOps to maximize cloud spending

Google Cloud FinOps Strategies

Because of the unpredictability of the current economic environment, businesses are being forced to undertake tactics to improve their financial resiliency and optimize their spending as a result of variables such as growing inflation, disruptions in supply chains, and rising costs. While it is common known that utilizing the cloud can result in lower IT capital expenses, it is important to keep in mind that a cloud strategy that is properly implemented can also help the reduction of operational costs while simultaneously encouraging innovation and the creation of new capabilities.

It is anticipated that by the year 2030, cloud computing would have contributed more than one trillion dollars’ worth of value to the Fortune 500 firms. In spite of this, respondents believe that the amount of money wasted on cloud services still exceeds 28%, as indicated by the results of the poll FlexeraTM 2023: State of the Cloud. Our mission is to assist you in maximizing the return on your investment in the cloud by locating novel approaches to cut down on or get rid of needless cloud charges. This will allow you to improve the efficiency of both your operational expenses (OpEx) and capital expenditures (CapEx).

Achieving cloud financial resilience with Cloud FinOps is a handbook that we’ve put together for you that you can download for free and use as a resource as you move on with your endeavor. It assists in guiding you to obtain a jumpstart by concentrating on adjustments that need little work in order for your firm to rapidly reach major benefits. This guide can help you stand up governance functions to foster a cost-conscious culture within your organization to generate sustainable business outcomes. As you continue to gather momentum in your journey toward FinOps, this guide can assist you in doing so.

Let’s take a brief look at a few fundamental cloud cost optimization methods that you can simply implement using Google Cloud. These methods, along with many more FinOps ideas, are covered in more detail in the handbook, which you can find here.

1. Get rid of any unused resources

If you are able to locate unused resources, this is an excellent location to begin cutting back on unnecessary cloud spending. Because of this, Google Cloud FinOps Hub notifies you in a proactive manner whenever resources such as VMs, databases, disks, IPs, and others are not being used.

2. Adjust the proportions of your cloud resources

Make sure that you are only paying for the cloud resources that you are actually utilizing. This is one of the most effective approaches to optimize cloud spending. Because rightsizing can be an unexpected challenge if you aren’t utilizing the correct tools, we’ve made it easier to right size through the Google Cloud FinOps Hub and the GKE Cost Optimization center. correct-sizing your infrastructure has never been easier.

3. Take advantage of the discounts offered for dedicated use

If you commit to using a certain amount of a resource or spending a certain amount of money over a certain period of time, you are eligible for a committed use discount (CUD), which offers significant savings in exchange for the commitment. Our cost-based CUDs are applicable to virtual machines (VMs), whilst our resource-based CUDs can be applied to databases, managed services, and other things as well.

4. Make the transition to managed services

Running workloads on-premises typically results in a substantially lower return on investment (ROI) than using Google Cloud, which provides numerous managed service versions of a variety of common workloads. Several examples include the usage of GKE for container management, Cloud SQL and AlloyDB for database management, and BigQuery for data warehouse management.

5. Put the billing tools to use

If your teams are unable to view the data, how are they supposed to know how much money they are spending? You have access to Console Billing Reports and cost breakdowns within Google Cloud, which enable visibility to analyze spend, budgets and notifications to keep your costs in check, cost estimations to generate better projections, as well as other features.

However, as was stated before, there is much more that can be done, and the five fast victories that were given above are an excellent place to begin.