Amazon Web Services joins the FinOps Foundation as a Premier Member

Customers have always been interested in understanding their cloud costs, and in today’s economic times, cost efficiency is a top priority for most organizations. The demand for cost management competency has resulted in the growth of FinOps teams across every major industry segment. Amazon Web Services provides Amazon Web Services Cloud Financial Management (CFM) Services , a set of industry-leading solutions to help customers manage and optimize their cloud spend. This includes services, tools, and resources to organize and track cost and usage data, enhance control through consolidated billing and access permission, and enable better planning through budgeting and forecasts, and further lower cost with pricing optimizations. To enhance our commitment to helping customers, we are excited to announce that Amazon Web Services has joined the FinOps Foundation as a premier member. As a member, we will partner with industry leaders to shape the vision and strategies employed to empower organizations for growth and increased operational efficiency.

“We are very excited to partner with the FinOps Foundation and empower the growing FinOps community. Having many channels to share best practices and opportunities for collaboration is great for our customers. Optimized resource utilization and intelligent purchasing strategies are more important than ever. We are committed to helping customers along their cloud financial management journey and see our membership in the FinOps Foundation as a vital step in making them successful.” -James Greenfield Vice President, Amazon Web Services Commerce Platform

What is the FinOps Foundation?
The FinOps Foundation is a non-profit trade association hosted at the Linux Foundation dedicated to advancing people who manage the value of cloud via community, education and best practices including the FinOps Frameworks. The FinOps Foundation community is made up of practitioners around the world, including many of our valued Amazon Web Services Cloud customers and partners. The FinOps Foundation hosts conferences, Working Groups and Special Interest groups covering topics like cost and usage data standardization, usage optimization, unit economics, and sustainability – utilizing the real-world stories and expertise in the community.

“Amazon Web Services is a cloud computing pioneer who shares our vision of accelerating the growth of FinOps practitioners with its presence, leadership, and innovation. We welcome Amazon Web Services’s participation in the FinOps community—as a key contributor to FOCUS and a voting TAC member— their membership will be a huge asset to the larger FinOps community and development and maturation of best practices across industries and the world.” —J.R. Storment, Executive Director of the FinOps Foundation.

Amazon Web Services Membership Roles
We are thankful for the opportunity to serve the community with our membership by joining FinOps Foundation board and committees. John Phillips, General Manager of Amazon Web Services Cost Management and Optimization, will serve on the Foundation Governing Board. John is responsible for the Amazon Web Services Billing and Cost Management portfolio including products such as Amazon Web Services Cost Explorer and Amazon Web Services Cost and Usage Reports. Rick Ochs, Product Management leader for Cloud Optimization, will join the FinOps Technical Advisory Council . Roy Wolman, Product Management leader for Cost Reporting and Visualization, will serve on the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification Steering Committee (FOCUS). These leaders are passionate about customers and committed to developing the FinOps discipline.

Creating specification and building community
The FinOps Foundation is leading an open billing standard called the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification ( FOCUS ). This specification is designed to bring commonality to billing data and tools across the cloud industry and to assist companies that struggle with data quality, accuracy, and transformation. Data is the underpinning requirement of most FinOps use cases such as chargeback, unit economics, organizational cost reporting, and more. We see this effort as extraordinarily important and are excited to join the FOCUS Working Group to play our role in defining, evangelizing and implementing this specification.

The FinOps Foundation community of members is growing rapidly and many Amazon Web Services customers have chosen to join. Monthly webinars have thousands of live participants and there are over 8,000 FinOps Certified Practitioners at the time of this post. FinOps Foundation marketing and events play a significant role in developing the community and offers value to both customers and now to Amazon Web Services. We are enthusiastic about the opportunity to collaborate and learn from the community at many of these events, such as the upcoming FinOps X 2024 conference. Additionally, we intend to participate in FinOps Roadshows, Community Days and have FinOps Foundation support at Amazon Web Services sponsored events such as Amazon Web Services re:Invent and Amazon Web Services Summits.

What’s next?
We have taken this step at an exciting time as there are many upcoming opportunities to demonstrate the value of our partnership. You can join us at the FinOps Roadshow networking event at Amazon Web Services re:Invent in Las Vegas on November 28th or stop by the CFM booth on the showroom floor. Our teams have already engaged with the FOCUS Working Group and updates will be provided over the coming months. To learn more about FinOps Foundation and to participate in the community, please join us at finops.org or in person at FinOps Las Vegas Roadshow in November.