AWS has dropped a series of FinOps-focused updates just ahead of re:Invent. It’s a strong push in the right direction—more visibility, more automation, and more structure for cloud cost management. But as always, the devil’s in the details. These tools are helpful, but they don’t match how real organizations work. Especially not at scale.
Here’s the breakdown: what’s new, what’s useful, where it still falls short—and how Finout plugs the holes.
Why it’s a step forward: AWS has finally extended Cost Explorer’s forecasting horizon from 12 to 18 months and added AI-powered explanations to help interpret those projections.
What’s missing: Forecasting that far out using historical trends is barely useful unless your workload is mind-numbingly stable. Most companies re-forecast quarterly. Eighteen-months of ML-based cost prediction without any connection to business drivers? It’s a nice UI upgrade, not real planning.
If you want something that actually works for budget cycles, driver-based forecasting is the way forward—and that’s where Finout comes in.
Why it’s exciting: Cost allocation by Kubernetes pod label—finally! If you’re running multi-tenant clusters, this unlocks a ton of previously hidden granularity.
What’s broken: It maxes out at 50 pod labels. Alphabetically selected. No prioritization. No override. That’s not even close to scalable in any real-world Kubernetes setup.
Finout supports full, customizable Kubernetes cost allocation without arbitrary limits. If your cluster’s got complexity (spoiler: it does), you’ll need it.
Why it’s useful: AWS now lets you auto-delete idle EBS volumes and upgrade old gp2 disks to gp3 or io2. Love it. Low-effort savings with solid safety controls (snapshots, rollback).
Where it breaks down: The person setting up the automation usually doesn’t own the resources. That’s fine in a small org. In an enterprise? You’re flying blind. There’s no built-in resource ownership awareness.
This is where Finout’s tag governance and ownership attribution shine. Automate responsibly - or don’t automate at all.
Why it’s good: You can now create anomaly monitors that break down by a tag key or cost category. That means broader coverage with less config overhead.
Where it falls short: You only get one tag. That’s it. Want to monitor by team and service? Too bad. Kubernetes label anomalies? Not possible.
You’re still stuck choosing one organizational lens. Finout lets you track anomalies across multiple dimensions, including labels, tags, services, teams—whatever structure you actually use.
Why it’s clever: One metric to show how much of your spend is optimized. It’s simple, trackable, and motivating—especially when you show how small changes impact the number.
Why it needs work: You can only measure at the account or region level. If you want to show the efficiency of a product line, business unit, or dev team—you’re out of luck.
Finout solves this with its FairShare cost model, which breaks down savings and efficiency based on how you actually structure your org.
Why it’s useful: You can now consolidate billing across multiple AWS orgs without having to merge them. Enterprises and MSPs rejoice.
Why it’s not the whole picture: Great—you get centralized invoices. But visibility, cost attribution, budgeting, and accountability still have to be built on top. AWS stops at the ledger. Finout gives you the full showback and chargeback structure needed to operate on it.
Why it’s a long-awaited win: You can now control which accounts can or can’t consume your commitment discounts. Enterprises finally have some guardrails.
What’s still missing: It’s binary. Account-level only. No granularity. No proportional allocation. No flexibility.
That’s where Finout’s FairShare cost type shines again—letting you control who gets how much of a shared discount, even across services, teams, and tags.
These AWS releases are some of the most FinOps-focused we’ve seen to date. The direction is right. The value is real. But they all share the same flaw: they assume your org is a spreadsheet, not a living, layered, ownership-messy business.
AWS builds great infrastructure. But FinOps doesn’t stop at infrastructure. It lives in your org chart, your team structure, your budget cycle, and your accountability model.
AWS gives you tools. Finout gives you a system.
And that’s what you need to actually manage cloud spend.