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Spring is a great reminder to spring clean – an annual tradition that should extend not only to your household, but also to your virtual cloud infrastructure. Why not start with Google Cloud’s FinOps Hub? 

As Google Cloud customers have adopted the FinOps hub to guide their optimization initiatives, we started getting additional feedback from our business community. For example, while DevOps users have access to tools and utilization metrics to identify waste, business teams often lack clear insights into resource consumption, leading to a significant blind spot. The most recent State of FinOps 2025 Report reinforces this need, underscoring the importance of workload optimization and waste reduction as the #1 Top FinOps concern. It’s extremely difficult to optimize workloads or applications if customers cannot fully understand how much is even being used. Why purchase a committed use discount for compute cores that you might not even be fully using? 

Sometimes the easiest optimizations our customers can make are really just using more efficiently the resources they are actually paying for. That’s why, in 2025, we are focused on the deep clean of your optimization opportunities and have upgraded FinOps Hub to help you find, highlight, and eliminate wasted spend.

1. Find waste: FinOps Hub 2.0 now comes with new utilization insights to zero in on optimization opportunities. 

At Google Cloud Next 2025, we introduced FinOps Hub 2.0, focused exclusively on bringing utilization insights on your resources to the forefront so you can see what potential waste may exist and take action immediately. Waste can come in many forms: from a VM that is barely getting used at 5% (overprovisioned), to a GKE cluster that is actually running hot at 110% utilization and might fail (underprovisioned), to managed resources like Cloud Run instances that may not be optimally configured (suboptimal configuration) or, worse yet, a VM that might not ever have been used (idle). FinOps users can now quickly view the most expensive waste category in one, easy-to-understand heatmap by service or AppHub application. But FinOps Hub doesn’t just show you where there may be waste; it also includes more cost optimizations for Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Compute Engine (GCE), Cloud Run, and Cloud SQL to remedy the waste too.

2. Highlight waste: Gemini Cloud Assist supercharges FinOps Hub to summarize optimization insights and send opportunities to engineering.

But perhaps what really makes this a 2.0 release is that we supercharged the most time-consuming tasks on FinOps Hub with Gemini Cloud Assist. Our first launch of Gemini Cloud Assist, which helps create personalized cost reports and synthesize insights, has resulted in >100k FinOps hours saved by our customers annually (from January 2024 to January 2025). The power of Gemini Cloud Assist to supercharge and automate workflows is a huge benefit, so we applied that to FinOps Hub in two ways. First, FinOps can now see embedded optimization insights on the hub itself –similar to cost reports – so you don’t need to solve the “needle in the haystack” problem of optimization. Second, you can now use Gemini Cloud Assist to summarize and send top waste insights to your engineering teams to take action and remediate fast.

3. Eliminate waste: introducing a NEW IAM role permission for your tech solution owners to see & directly take action on these optimization opportunities.

Finally, perhaps our most exciting feature – and long overdue for FinOps – is that we are unlocking access to the Billing console for tech solution owners, so that these owners can get FinOps insights and Gemini Cloud Assist insights across all their projects, in a single pane. For example, if you want to give access to FinOps Hub or cost reports to an entire department that only uses a subset of projects for their infrastructure – without providing them with broader billing data access, but still allowing them to see all of their data in a single view – now you can, with multi-project views in the billing console. Multi-project views are enabled using the new Project Billing Costs Manager IAM role (or related granular permissions). These new permissions are currently in private preview so sign-up to get access. Now you can truly extend the power of FinOps tools across your organization with these new access controls.  

So take this Spring to try FinOps Hub 2.0 with Gemini Cloud Assist, and do some spring cleaning on your cloud infrastructure, because as the saying goes, “With clouds overgrown, like winter’s old grime, Spring clean your servers, save dollars and time.” – well at least that’s what they say according to Gemini.