Key Insight: AWS demonstrated support of FOCUS 1.2, including improvements to invoice reconciliation, capacity reservation tracking, and support for virtual currencies. All databases now have Savings Plans available, a long-awaited release that provides commitment-based discounts for databases. They also announced AI for FinOps capabilities using Amazon Q and Quick Suite, Cost Optimization releases via Compute Optimizer Automation, network throughput optimization via idle recommendations for NAT Gateways, and revealed a new Cost Efficiency Metric.
Another AWS re:Invent in the books also means many releases that enhance the FinOps practice. Between using the unifying language of FinOps, FOCUS 1.2, AI features, improvements to Cost Efficiency tooling, and Savings Plans for Databases, there’s plenty for FinOps practitioners to begin to work into their practice into the new year.
FOCUS 1.2 Data Export for AWS
Back in November, AWS announced that FOCUS 1.2 Data Exports were now Generally Available.
Matt Cowsert (FinOps Foundation) and Letian Feng (AWS) discuss AWS General Availability for FOCUS 1.2 Data Exports.
- Invoice reconciliation capabilities: Using the InvoiceId column enables direct correlation between your AWS Cost and Usage data and AWS invoices. This reduction in manual work can reduce monthly finance reconciliation from days to hours.
- Capacity reservation status tracking: The CapacityReservationId and CapacityReservationStatus columns help practitioners identify and track On-Demand Capacity Reservations and EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML (Machine Learning), providing visibility into whether reserved capacity is used or unused. Practitioners can monitor utilization from this standardized dataset, improving how they utilize reserved capacity.
- Virtual currency support enabling SaaS integration: Virtual currency and token concepts used by SaaS providers now have support in FOCUS 1.2-conformant datasets. FinOps practitioners can unify cost reporting between the AWS FOCUS 1.2 Data Export with SaaS providers that also support FOCUS 1.2.
Get started with FOCUS 1.2 Data Exports.
Database Savings Plans
Joe Daly (FinOps Foundation) and Rick Ochs (AWS) dive into the highly anticipated launch of Database Savings Plans.
Savings Plans are now available for AWS database products, and users can achieve up to 35% savings via a 1-year commitment. Database Savings Plans support both Intel and Graviton instances across Generation 7 and above, covering both serverless and provisioned deployment models. Regardless of any current architecture choices, users can benefit from these savings plans.
Learn more from this release article.
Expanding AI for FinOps
Liam Greenamyre (AWS) gives Joe Daly us a look at how Kiro and Amazon Q enhance AI for FinOps workflows.
Amazon Q Enhancements
Practitioners can now use Amazon Q to help them with FinOps, finding savings opportunities, estimating the cost of a new workload, tracking costs against budgets, and even identifying root-cause cost anomalies, just to identify a few FinOps actions.
AWS reports that Amazon Q is now much more intelligent than it was at the beginning of the year. Alongside the launch of their open-source Billing and Cost Management MCP server, there are now more ways than ever for FinOps practitioners to interact. These capabilities are available via IDE, in the CLI, and AWS encourages and empowers building custom AI agents on top of AWS billing and cost management services.
Access Agentic FinOps via Amazon Quick Suite
The AWS team revealed Amazon Quick Suite, a chatbot that answers your questions and turns those answers into actions using agentic teammates for research, business insights, and automation.
AWS Cost Optimization
AWS Compute Optimizer Automation
FinOps practitioners can now apply optimization recommendations directly from Compute Optimizer. This can include snapshots and deletion of unattached Amazon EBS volumes and upgrading volume types to the latest generation, for example. Streamline Compute Optimizer Automation using rules. Users can automatically apply recommendations on a recurring schedule whenever they match your specified criteria, and monitor automation status and track estimated monthly savings through a single dashboard.
Optimize with peace of mind knowing that users can restore volumes from snapshot or reverse volume type changes at any time.
Idle Recommendations for NAT Gateways
Cost Optimizer can now help users identify unused NAT Gateway resources while protecting their high-availability configurations. It looks at the last 32 days of CloudWatch metrics to identify unused gateways and provides actionable recommendations to optimize usage.
Cost Efficiency Metric
To answer their users’ request for a common cloud efficiency metric, AWS came up with a Cost Efficiency Metric, now available in the Cost Optimization Hub.
Cost efficiency = [1 - (Potential Savings / Total Optimizable Spend)] × 100%
The metric looks at a 90-day history of cost and usage, factoring in commitment-based discounts, idle, modernization, and rightsizing metrics to deliver a comprehensive, standardized metric that ties optimization to your cloud business.
Learn more about the Cost Efficiency Metric on the AWS blog.
Additional FinOps Related Releases
While announced prior to AWS re:Invent, here are other notable FinOps releases any AWS user should be aware of:
- Cloud Financial Management MCP Server
- Improve Cost Allocation for AWS Transit Gateway
- AWS EC2 Interrupible Capacity Reservations
- Auto-scale Athena Capacity Reservations and refined per-query DPU use
- Amazon Bedrock now has a Reserved Service tier
- SageMaker HyperPod improvements optimize GPU inference cost and usage
- Optimize AWS S3 and Amazon Kinesis Video Streams with latest improvements
- AWS Backup improves via cost-efficient storage classes
- AWS License Manager adds license asset groups
- AWS Cost Anomaly Detection improves its detection speed and accuracy
- AWS CloudWatch EC2 in-console management streamlines optimization process
- Optimize analytics pipeline cost and usage via AWS Iceberg V3 and new Glue releases
Join Us at Our December 2025 FinOps Summit
We want to hear from our community and what you think about these latest AWS releases and how they affect your practice. Register for the December 2025 FinOps Summit, Thursday, December 11th at 8AM PT.
Sound off, join the discussion, and bring your questions to the community and our AWS speakers. See you there.
Topics
-
Industry Updates
