Mastering Cloud Costs with FinOps on Google Cloud

Digital Team
Jun 26
3 min read

Updated: Jul 8

Bringing visibility and accountability to cloud spending

Managing cloud costs effectively is increasingly vital as organizations expand their cloud usage. FinOps—a framework that aligns engineering, finance, and business teams—promotes shared responsibility and enhances financial decision-making.

This article explores how Google Cloud (GCP) supports FinOps goals through tools like FinOps Hub 2.0, Gemini Cloud Assist, and Google’s built-in billing and optimization services. Our aim is to provide organizations with a clear view of their cloud usage, identify waste, and empower teams to take cost-aware action.

1. FinOps Hub 2.0: Improving visibility of usage and waste

FinOps Hub 2.0 is Google Cloud’s central platform for managing and optimizing cloud spending. With its new features focusing on resource utilization, teams can quickly pinpoint areas of overprovisioning (like a virtual machine used at just 5% capacity) or underprovisioning (such as a GKE cluster operating at 110% utilization).

Visual tools, including a waste heatmap, help highlight inefficiencies across services such as Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, and Cloud Run. This allows FinOps teams to take immediate, data-driven actions to minimize waste.

2. Gemini Cloud Assist: Turning insights into actions

Gemini Cloud Assist, now integrated with FinOps Hub, delivers summarized insights and suggested actions. It highlights key waste patterns and drafts messages to communicate optimization opportunities with engineering teams.

By automating the delivery of insights, Gemini Cloud Assist has saved customers over 100,000 hours of manual FinOps work in a year. It significantly reduces the time needed to discover optimization details and accelerates collaboration between teams.

3. Expanding access: Multi-project views with new IAM roles

A significant enhancement for FinOps practice in GCP is the ability to grant solution owners access to relevant cost insights across multiple projects. With the new IAM role, Project Billing Costs Manager, teams can view billing data specifically related to their projects—without exposure to broader financial information.

This change facilitates the extension of FinOps practices across departments while maintaining proper access controls. It fosters a more federated and scalable approach to financial governance in the cloud.

4. Core GCP tools to support FinOps workflows

Beyond FinOps Hub and Gemini Cloud Assist, GCP offers an array of built-in tools that support the FinOps lifecycle:

Billing Export and BigQuery: Allows raw data analysis across projects and time periods.
Cost Insights Dashboard: Provides templated visual reports for straightforward visibility of expenses and trends.
Recommendations Hub: Highlights suggestions to reduce costs across various services.
Budgets and Alerts: Enables teams to monitor spending and stick to set targets.
Forecasting Tools: Features both console-based and custom forecasts using BigQuery ML or Data Studio.

These tools streamline the FinOps lifecycle—informing decisions, optimizing expenditure, and embedding cost awareness into daily operations.

5. Automating and enforcing best practices

Effective FinOps on GCP hinges on robust tagging and automation. Labels used at the project level facilitate clear cost allocation. Tools like Forseti Config Validator can detect labeling violations and support compliance, while the Cloud Foundation Toolkit assists in automating label creation at project setup.

To further enforce best practices, GCP provides policy-as-code options and recommends a structured onboarding process, which includes architecture and cost reviews.

Driving cultural change with FinOps principles

Google’s FinOps framework advocates for cultural values such as transparency, shared responsibility, and continuous improvement. Teams are urged to:

Make data visible and usable for everyone
Respond to cost insights promptly
View cost anomalies as learning opportunities, rather than failures
Collaborate cross-functionally to prioritize optimization tasks

These principles are supported by tools designed to educate users (through learning services and internal communities), incentivize performance, and measure workload value over time.

Ongoing optimization and value tracking

FinOps is an ongoing process. GCP encourages regular cost reviews, re-forecasting, and workload value tracking.

Workload owners can utilize unit economics—such as cost per active user or cost per transaction—to assess whether their cloud investments are justified. This methodology aids ongoing funding decisions and ensures that optimization efforts align with business objectives.

Conclusion: GCP tools offer practical support for FinOps adoption

Google Cloud provides an extensive suite of services that aligns with the FinOps framework. From FinOps Hub 2.0 to built-in reporting, forecasting, and automation, these tools empower organizations to gain better control over their cloud costs.

Adopting FinOps in GCP involves more than just utilizing new tools; it requires cultivating a culture of cost awareness, accountability, and collaboration. With the appropriate structure and support, organizations can effectively reduce waste, enhance decision-making, and unlock greater business value from their cloud investments.

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