· Generative AI · 2 min read
Slashing Cloud Costs with Generative FinOps
Cloud bills are complex and opaque. See how LLMs can analyse billing data, identify wasted resources, and automatically suggest reserved instances to optimise your cloud spend.
The cloud promise was “pay for what you use.” The reality is often “pay for what you forgot to turn off.”
As cloud environments grow, understanding the monthly bill becomes a forensic exercise. Traditional FinOps tools give you dashboards, but Generative FinOps gives you answers.
The Problem: Data Overload
A detailed billing report from AWS or Google Cloud can contain millions of lines. Finding a spike in data transfer costs or an unattached EBS volume in that haystack is manually impossible.
How GenAI Changes the Game
Large Language Models (LLMs) are exceptionally good at pattern recognition and processing unstructured text (like tags and logs).
1. “Conversational” Billing Analysis
Imagine asking your dashboard:
“Why did our EC2 spend increase by 15% last Tuesday?”
An LLM-powered agent can query the underlying billing data, correlate it with audit logs (e.g., “User X launched 5 GPU instances”), and provide a plain English explanation.
2. Automated Tagging & Attribution via AI
Traditional FinOps relies on humans remembering to add tags (like CostCenter or Project). Humans forget, leading to “Unallocated” spend.
GenAI solves this by analyzing the context. By reading the resource names, deployment logs, and even the content of the databases, an Agent can reasonably infer:
- “This S3 bucket contains
marketing-campaign-v1images, so it belongs to theMarketingCost Center.” - “This VM was deployed by
jenkins-test-pipeline, so it belongs toQA.”
It can then automatically apply these tags (or suggest them for approval), cleaning up your cost allocation without nagging developers.
3. Anomaly Detection & Remediation
While traditional ML can spot anomalies, GenAI can suggest fixes.
- Alert: “RDS instance
prod-dbhas < 5% CPU usage for 30 days.” - AI Suggestion: “This looks like an abandoned development database. Should I snapshot and terminate it? Estimated savings: £450/month.”
The Future of FinOps is Autonomous
We are moving towards a future where the cloud optimises itself. Managing costs shouldn’t require a PhD in AWS billing.
At Alps Agility, we integrate AI-driven cost management strategies into every platform we build. We help you ensure every pound spent on the cloud delivers value.
Contact us today to start your FinOps assessment and stop the cloud waste.
