The Future of FinOps with AWS’s VP of Commerce Platform

Key Insight: AWS doubles down on data with commitments to deliver more types of data and finer-grained data for more of the services they offer. Better data, as well as FOCUS, will unlock faster decision-making and more innovation.

At FinOps X in San Diego in June 2024, J.R. Storment, Executive Director of the FinOps Foundation, sat down with James Greenfield, VP of AWS Commerce Platform, to ask what he thinks the Future of FinOps will look like.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) remains true to its customers, promising to deliver faster, more granular cost and usage data to enable optimization, more types of data (e.g., carbon data), and to help them consume all this data programmatically. AWS is committed to widening “coverage,” i.e., delivering finer-grained data for more of the services they offer.

James believes that as FinOps evolves, teams will naturally want cost data earlier in the product development process so they don’t have to refactor applications and workloads after deployment. This “shifting left” of cost consideration leads to more cost-aware product decisions at all stages of the product lifecycle, and ultimately, the most efficient operations.

AWS is investing in FOCUS, and James believes it will “scoop the whole industry together” as FinOps Practitioners begin to incorporate costs beyond public cloud.

As far as GenAI goes, James cautions that people will make the mistake of trying to apply GenAI everywhere, rather than sprinkle it where it can be most valuable. Applying it everywhere is a waste of money, because AI is not great at everything. So we need to target use-cases for GenAI that it will be good at.