Top FinOps Tools for Cost Control in AWS and Azure

Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are the most popular cloud managed services providers in the world. They have made cloud computing more accessible and created better cloud infrastructure with innovative technologies.

But there is a common concern about cloud computing. As organizations scale their cloud footprints, one reality quickly sets in: cloud costs spiral very quickly. Even if an enterprise is cautious about its budget constraints, day-to-day business operations often leave no choice but to stretch its budget.

And if your business is growing or has ambitious plans for the future, you wouldn’t even realize how your cloud bill will go off the charts. Despite promises of pay-as-you-go efficiency, cloud services from AWS and Azure can rack up millions in unoptimized spending.

Engineering teams move fast, but finance teams struggle to predict and control costs. To fix this problem, cloud experts came up with the idea of cloud financial management, commonly known as FinOps.

The core objective behind FinOps is to effectively manage an organization’s cloud infrastructure to get maximum value. But FinOps is more than tagging resources and checking cost dashboards, especially at scale. It’s a cultural, operational, and technological shift.

So how do AWS and Azure compare when it comes to real cost control? In this article, we’ll explore the top FinOps tools provided by AWS and Azure to manage your cloud infrastructure effectively.

What is FinOps?

FinOps is a strategic approach consisting of several practices and principles to manage cloud infrastructure effectively. It helps reduce cloud computing costs and maximize the return on investment. FinOps brings together finance, IT, development, engineering, and operations teams to optimize the financial side of cloud computing.

The idea of FinOps is an extension of the DevOps paradigm, and it emerged in the early 2010s as cloud application development and other cloud resources became more mainstream. However, the establishment of the FinOps Foundation in 2019 made the approach really popular in cloud infrastructure management.

FinOps is a cloud financial management discipline that enables organizations to:

Optimize cloud costs without slowing down innovation
Enable cross-functional teams (engineering, finance, operations) to collaborate
Make data-driven spending decisions
Finding cost-saving ways and implementing governance measures

It’s a practice that combines:

Visibility (where is the money going?)
Optimization (how can we reduce waste?)
Governance (how do we manage budgets and accountability?)

In short, FinOps ensures that your every dime spent on cloud computing brings business value.

The challenges of cloud cost control at scale

Using cloud computing resources can be very challenging as it is. But as cloud usage grows, so do the challenges:

Thousands of microservices and resources
Decentralized teams spinning up environments
Idle or unused cloud resources
Billing complexity of the cloud provider
Dynamic scaling, serverless, and autoscaling workloads
Shadow IT and untagged resources
Cloud infrastructure management budget planning and forecasting
Under-provisioning of resources
Lack of unified governance across regions and teams

Without intentional FinOps practices, teams get hit with:

Budget overruns
“Sticker shock” from unused or misconfigured services
CFOs demanding visibility that the platform can’t yet offer

The core principles of FinOps

The FinOps Foundation, which is a non-profit association for advancing the discipline of cloud financial management, has defined the following six principles as core of the FinOps strategy.

These principles are the roadmap for any organization that wants to implement FinOps in its cloud operations.

1. Collaboration

Team collaboration and cross-functional collaboration are pivotal to FinOps. Different business teams work together to find a balance between financial goals and operational objectives.

2. Ownership and transparency

Every team and department takes ownership of their cloud usage. Cloud engineers should be empowered and accountable for the costs they generate. Moreover, cost data should be transparent and accessible with real-time and accurate metrics about cloud usage.

3. Central team for FinOps

While individual teams manage their own usage, there should be a centralized FinOps team that encourages and enables best practices to be implemented across the cloud environment.

This central team is responsible for:

Implementing shared best practices
Enforcing governance models
Optimizing efforts across the organization

Central FinOps teams are usually made up of procurement leads, finance leads, cloud architects, and FinOps analysts.

4. Business value is supreme

Business value drives cloud decisions and not the other way around. Every spending on cloud infrastructure management is to support business goals in FinOps.

This means:

Prioritizing cost-performance trade-offs over cheapest options
ROI, scalability, and time-to-market gains should be the linchpin of cloud spendings

5. Reports should be timely and accessible

FinOps requires processing and sharing cost data as soon as possible. Real-time cost visibility at all levels of the organization is also essential. Further, feedback loops should be fast, and reports must be actionable, not just historical.

All these measures help make informed decisions, and the faster the teams see cost data, the faster they can act.

6. Capitalize on variable cost models

Managed cloud services providers don’t have fixed-capacity IT models. Use that to your advantage as the cloud offers elasticity, flexibility, and opportunities for automation.

Variable cloud pricing models are an opportunity to deliver more value. Lastly, planning iteratively for cost optimization is better than long-term planning.

️How Azure and AWS enable FinOps

The big three cloud providers, Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud, have been increasing their support for FinOps operations. Recently, all of them have agreed to release their export billing and usage data in the FOCUS format, which is approved by the FinOps Foundation.

Moreover, both Azure and AWS have developed several native tools that support FinOps best practices. Let’s break down the key FinOps capabilities offered by Azure and AWS, and how they stack up in practice.

Azure FinOps tools and strategies

1. Cost Management and billing (Azure Portal)

Unified dashboard for budgeting, forecasting, and cost analysis

Supports cross-subscription and management group views

Cost allocation across departments and resource groups

Azure Advisor provides cost-saving recommendations

2. Azure Reservations and savings Plans

Pre-pay for 1- or 3-year terms for services like VMs and SQL DBs
Savings up to 72% for consistent workloads

3. Azure Hybrid benefit

Reuse on-prem Windows Server and SQL Server licenses in Azure
Major savings for enterprise licenses

4. Tagging and policy enforcement

Use Azure Policy to enforce mandatory cost tagging
Integrate with Azure Monitor and Log Analytics to track usage anomalies

5. FinOps integrations

Integrates with Microsoft Cost Management + Power BI

Export to Azure Data Lake for custom FinOps analytics

Supports Chargeback and Showback reports for internal billing

AWS FinOps tools and strategies

1. AWS Cost Explorer

Visualize spend across accounts, services, regions
Forecast future spend using historical trends
Group and filter by tags, linked accounts, usage types

2. AWS Budgets & Alerts

Set up cost, usage, or reservation coverage budgets
Automate alerts via email, SNS, or programmatic actions

3. Savings Plans & Reserved Instances

Commit to consistent usage (e.g., EC2, Fargate, Lambda)
Up to 66% discount over on-demand rates

4. AWS Compute Optimizer & Trusted Advisor

Recommends rightsizing EC2, RDS, Lambda functions
Identifies idle or underutilized resources

5. Tagging & Cost Allocation Tags

Supports user-defined tags for granular chargeback
Use Cost Categories to organize spend by business unit, product, or environment

6. Consolidated Billing & Organizations

Centralized billing across linked accounts
Enables shared savings plans and volume discounts

Azure vs AWS: FinOps features comparison

Both AWS and Azure offer discounts and savings when you use their FinOps features for a long time. But their internal details differ slightly.

FinOps Capability	Azure	AWS
Native Cost Analytics	Azure Cost Management + Power BI	AWS Cost Explorer + Athena (custom queries)
Budgeting & Forecasting	Yes, per subscription/resource group	Yes, with detailed alerts & automation
Savings Plans/Reservations	Azure Reservations + Hybrid Benefit	EC2 + Compute + Lambda Savings Plans
Tag Enforcement	Azure Policy & Blueprints	Manual + Tag policies in AWS Organizations
Rightsizing Recommendations	Azure Advisor	AWS Compute Optimizer + Trusted Advisor
Chargeback/Showback	Native + Data Lake + Power BI	Via CUR (Cost and Usage Reports), Athena, QuickSight
Third-Party Integration	Strong (Apptio Cloudability, Flexera, CloudHealth)	Strong (CloudHealth, Apptio, Spot.io)
Multi-cloud Visibility	Built-in with Cost Management	Requires third-party or AWS Marketplace tool

Real-world FinOps practices at scale: AWS vs Azure

You can use pricing calculators offered by AWS and Azure to estimate costs and select your resources. Further, both platforms also offer free tiers to help you get started with FinOps practices.

But which one is best for cloud financial management? The answer to that depends on your situation and use case.

What works well in Azure:

Azure’s deep integration with Power BI gives finance teams powerful visualizations and forecasting capabilities.
Azure Policies for tag enforcement help ensure every resource is billable and traceable.
The Hybrid Benefit is a game-changer for Microsoft-licensed enterprises.

What works well in AWS:

AWS provides granular control and reporting via CUR and Athena for custom queries.
The breadth of recommendations from Trusted Advisor and Compute Optimizer is great for engineering teams.
Multi-account strategy with Organizations enables clean separation and governance at scale.

Cultural aspects of FinOps

Like DevOps, FinOps is a culture. It goes beyond cost control and focuses on people, processes, tools, and processes.

FinOps Pillar	Practice at Scale
Inform	Share real-time cost dashboards with teams
Optimize	Incentivize engineers to right-size resources
Operate	Set clear budgets and alerts per team/service
Own	Decentralize cost accountability

Case study: FinOps in action

Here are two real-world use case scenarios to understand how FinOps works.

A global SaaS company using Azure

Tags enforced via Azure Policy
Daily export to Data Lake + Power BI dashboards
Monthly chargeback per business unit
Saved $800K annually by automating VM size recommendations from Azure Advisor

A Tech startup scaling on AWS

Used Savings Plans + Lambda cost insights
Automated budget alerts to Slack
Adopted Spot Instances via EC2 Auto Scaling
Reduced EC2 cost by 60% in 3 months

Final verdict: Azure vs AWS for FinOps

Based on the discussion so far, AWS is better equipped to handle large-scale FinOps operations, and it has more mature tools with multi-cloud support. On the other hand, Azure’s FinOps tools are more user-friendly and intuitive to use. Azure also lets you connect cloud cost management with your development workflows through Copilot.

Use Case	Best Platform
Enterprise financial governance	Azure (Power BI + Hybrid Benefit)
Developer-first cost accountability	AWS (deep CUR + automation)
Multi-account enterprise architecture	AWS (Organizations + consolidated billing)
Microsoft licensing reuse	Azure (Hybrid Benefit, License Mobility)
Flexible tagging and cost control	Tie (both have strong tagging ecosystems)

Conclusion

Cloud computing has changed the business world for the better. It has allowed more scalability, flexibility, and wider reach for enterprises of any size. Azure and AWS have been at the forefront of this change.

Therefore, it is not a surprise that they are also leaders in solving the challenge of cost efficiency in cloud infrastructure management through their FinOps tools. As organizations grow, cloud costs can get out of hand without you even knowing when and how it happened.

FinOps is mission-critical for modern cloud operations. Both Azure and AWS provide powerful tools to help organizations measure, optimize, and govern cloud spend. Azure shines in enterprise integration and financial reporting, while AWS leads in developer-centric cost insights and automation.

The best FinOps strategies are platform-aware but not platform-bound. They combine automation, accountability, and cross-team collaboration to control spending without slowing down innovation.

Xavor provides expert cloud managed services for AWS and Azure. Our certified AWS and Azure cloud experts can manage your entire cloud infrastructure, from technical aspects to cost optimization. Partner with us today and drop a line at [email protected] to explore our cloud offerings.