Unlocking AWS Cost Efficiency Secrets: Lessons from Amazon's FinOps Journey
Learn how Amazon itself does finops
Steph Gooch
Amazon Employee
Published Mar 17, 2025
In this episode of the "Keys to Database Optimization" show, host Steph Gooch is joined by Travis James and Nate Perry, two experts from the AWS OPTICS team, to share insights on how Amazon optimizes its cloud spending and leverages FinOps principles. As an AWS customer itself, Amazon has valuable lessons to share on driving cost efficiency and managing cloud financial operations.
1. Amazon treats itself as an external AWS customer, subject to the same billing and optimization requirements as any other organization.
2. AWS was born out of Amazon's own need to efficiently utilize its computing resources, leading to the development of services like S3.
3. Amazon uses a comprehensive "credit score" system to assess cloud financial health, evaluating factors like utilization, forecasting, and business efficiency.
4. Developing strong relationships between FinOps teams and engineering groups is crucial for driving cloud cost optimization.
5. Governance and automation are key, but Amazon takes a balanced approach, empowering teams to make their own optimization decisions.
6. Sustainability is an emerging focus, with teams exploring ways to link efficiency initiatives to environmental impact.
7. Tools like Amazon QuickSight and Athena provide powerful analytics capabilities to support FinOps efforts.
2. AWS was born out of Amazon's own need to efficiently utilize its computing resources, leading to the development of services like S3.
3. Amazon uses a comprehensive "credit score" system to assess cloud financial health, evaluating factors like utilization, forecasting, and business efficiency.
4. Developing strong relationships between FinOps teams and engineering groups is crucial for driving cloud cost optimization.
5. Governance and automation are key, but Amazon takes a balanced approach, empowering teams to make their own optimization decisions.
6. Sustainability is an emerging focus, with teams exploring ways to link efficiency initiatives to environmental impact.
7. Tools like Amazon QuickSight and Athena provide powerful analytics capabilities to support FinOps efforts.
Notable Quotes:
- "Amazon is treated as a customer, similarly to any external customer, meaning we had our own cloud journey, moving to the cloud out of traditional on-premises data centers." - Nate Perry
- "Amazon is treated as a customer, similarly to any external customer, meaning we had our own cloud journey, moving to the cloud out of traditional on-premises data centers." - Nate Perry
Conclusion:
This episode offers a unique behind-the-scenes look at how Amazon, as a major AWS customer, approaches cloud cost optimization and FinOps. The insights shared by Travis and Nate provide valuable lessons for any organization looking to improve their cloud financial management and unlock greater efficiency in their AWS spending. Be sure to check out the on-demand stream of this episode on the AWS Cost Optimization YouTube channel.
Youtube link: https://youtube.com/watch?v=U9HZvuWqOIo
Any opinions in this post are those of the individual author and may not reflect the opinions of AWS.