AWS's new FinOps agent may sound transformative, but really isn't

Back in 2021 when money was still cheap and interest rates were low, companies weren't all that concerned with controlling cloud costs, but as the economy worsened in subsequent years and interest rates rose, management became more interested in finding ways to save money. Enter FinOps tools, which help set up cost guardrails and shut down orphaned projects that can add up to significant costs.

As with everything else these days, there's now an agent for that, and earlier this month, ahead of the AWS Summit in NYC, Amazon announced it was launching a new FinOps agent.

It's part chatbot and part automation engine, but it's still basically the same type of financial controls that you've been seeing from the cloud vendors and external software companies for a number of years now wrapped in an AI package.

David Linthicum, author, podcaster and long-time cloud and AI expert, who runs Linthicum Research, isn't terribly impressed. "I see this as another case of the industry slapping "agent" on everything and calling it innovation," he told FastForward. "FinOps platforms have been doing active monitoring, anomaly detection and automated workflows for years. AWS is essentially adding a natural language interface and some correlation logic with CloudTrail—and calling it revolutionary."

He's right. The AI part is really about querying your billing information looking for anomalies, and, yes, you can schedule the agent to run these queries for you automatically. It has utility for things like searching for orphaned projects and other easy pickings without requiring manual review by humans, but it's not really doing anything new.

Linthicum says it's important that enterprise buyers understand what they're getting here. "Is it a step in the right direction? Sure. A unified interface that investigates anomalies and routes findings to Jira—that's useful. But let's be clear: this is a feature upgrade, not a paradigm shift. Enterprises should evaluate it as better automation within the AWS ecosystem."

The tool is available for free for now in public preview, subject to monthly usage limits (like so many AI tools these days).

Editor's Note: This is an extended version of a news brief that originally appeared in FastForward #69.