Last month, we attended our second Google Cloud Next—Google Cloud Next 2025 and it was a magical experience. Truly something to remember. It’s always a pleasure to be part of the energy at Google Cloud Next. From the diverse blend of cloud professionals, seasoned technology investors and executives, startup-minded platform engineers, and a growing presence of FinOps leaders.
Whether you’re interested in AI advancements, fine-tuning your infrastructure, or discovering the best way to improve cloud cost efficiency, Google Cloud Next is where those conversations come to life. Don’t take our word for it. Check out Google Cloud’s 229 announcements from Google Cloud Next.
Being in the mix for 2025’s Google Cloud Next, participating online and on the conference floor, was memorable for the ProsperOps team and everyone we met. ProsperNauts arrived in Las Vegas, before the conference to host our FinOps Community Celebration. Followed on Wednesday with a private breakfast meetup for FinOps engineers, cohosted with Glean and CWX.
Then, conference attendees in Las Vegas, online, and around the world officially kicked-off Google Cloud Next 2025 with a keynote from Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian. Day one was filled with educational breakouts, conference theater talks, live “hackathons” and training sessions. Later, one of our FinOps specialists hosted a Cloud Talk session on advanced commitment management and achieving world-class cloud savings with automation.
As previously mentioned, Google Cloud Next featured over two hundred announcements. This blog contains essential items related to cloud FinOps and cloud cost management and highlights from our team’s participation in Google Cloud Next 2025.
FinOps Community Celebration
Before the conference officially began, we brought together FinOps leaders and Google Cloud experts at our FinOps Community Celebration, co-hosted with CloudZero.
It was a chance to connect with peers, share experiences, and talk about where FinOps is headed, without the slides or agendas. From shared challenges to new ideas, it was a calm start to the packed week grounded in community.
FinOps Leaders Breakfast Club
We started Google Cloud Next 2025 with our first FinOps Engineers Breakfast Club. Breakfast conversations included practical discussions around Google Cloud spending, managing cloud waste, how AI has impacted Google Cloud consumption, cost management strategies, and how teams are evolving their FinOps practices to support on-premise environments too.
Our Chief Product Officer, Erik Carlin, talked about why flexibility and risk reduction should be at the core of your cloud cost management strategy. In short, teams need intelligent automation if they are going to reduce costs without locking themselves into inflexible terms. ProsperOps introduced a new FinOps metric, Commitment Lock-in Risk (CLR), which helps teams measure and understand their financial risk related to cloud costs.
ProsperOps at Booth 1413
The ProsperOps booth was hard to miss! Booth 1413 was a popular spot in a bustling conference hall full of cloud vendors. Our value resonated best with FinOps teams looking to get started with or simplify committed-use discount (CUD) management, reduce Google Cloud costs, and understand how to optimize cloud spend without trading financial lock-in risk.
Conversations with conferencegoers included live demos, discussing how ProsperOps dynamically adjusts Committed Use Discounts in real time to match usage, and the latest Google Cloud announcements. Topics from our best conversations included how our automation safely closes CUD coverage gaps, maximizing your ROI, and why ProsperOps returns more money to your budget than even the “best” DIY approaches to rate optimization. Interesting to hear that teams are beginning to adopt rate optimization before workload or usage optimization, which contradicts what most FinOps teams address first: engineering optimizations.
People initially came by our booth to learn about intelligent FinOps automation and reducing cloud costs, but stayed to get a fortune from ProsperBot Predicts!
This year at Google Cloud Next, we unveiled a customized fortune-teller machine designed after our ProsperBot. Step up to POltar, clear your mind, and press the button to receive a prediction about your FinOps future. Between fortunes, POltar cracked its favorite cloud “dad” jokes and shared insights about FinOps, leading to smiles, nods, and laughs from attendees. Keep an eye out for ProsperBot at upcoming cloud and technology conferences.
Google Cloud Talk with Our FinOps Specialist
One of the standout moments of the week was our Cloud Talk from Senior FinOps Specialist, Andrew DeLave. During his session, Andrew highlighted the hidden cost of trying to manage CUDs without automation, especially in volatile cloud environments. He also shared why sophisticated teams are rethinking how they approach commitment management on Google Cloud, adopting strategies like Adaptive Laddering to balance savings and lock-in risk, leading to overall better FinOps outcomes.
He explained how to drive more CUD-based savings without getting stuck in an overcommitted state or losing coverage amid usage spikes. Andrew shared real-life examples of how adaptively laddering commitments improves flexibility (aka, risk reduction) while still capturing deeper cloud discounts, and returning more money to your cloud budget. Lastly, he showed how ProsperOps automatically optimizes your CUDs and Flex CUDs in various usage scenarios, without any ongoing effort.
Key Announcements from Google Cloud Next 2025
Google Cloud introduced hundreds of product, platform, and partner program updates. These stood out as gains for cloud FinOps professionals and anyone interested in cloud cost management:
FinOps Hub 2.0 (GA)
The upgraded FinOps Hub now integrates utilization insights with cost data and AI-powered recommendations, making it easier to identify and act on potential waste. A new waste heatmap provides quick visual insights into over- or under-provisioned resources.
Gemini Cloud Assist for FinOps
This new AI-powered cloud assistant will help generate personalized cost reports, analyze trends, identify optimization opportunities within FinOps Hub, and help interact with engineering teams to act on waste insights.
Cost Explorer Enhancements
The enhanced Cost Explorer offers more detailed visibility into cost and usage patterns across specific Google Cloud projects and App Hub applications. It now supports historical data views and helps identify low-utilization, high-cost resources that may benefit from optimization.
Extended CUD Commitment Terms
Google Cloud now allows commitments to be extended up to six years, providing greater long-term cost savings. Additionally, new features enable auto-renewal of commitments and the ability to merge or split existing commitments.
Expanded CUD Coverage
CUDs have been extended to cover additional resource types, including Local SSDs and services such as GKE Autopilot and Cloud Run. This expansion allows for broader discounts across various workloads.
BigQuery CUDs
BigQuery now supports Committed Use Discounts (CUDs), which offer discounted prices in exchange for a commitment to usage over a defined period of time. These CUDs provide a more predictable pricing model for data analytics workloads, making it easier to manage spending while scaling.
Until Next Time, Google Cloud Next!
Google Cloud Next 2025 was a success — insightful sessions, meaningful conversations, and a shared focus on building smarter, more efficient cloud operations.
Thank you to everyone who connected with us, and if we missed you, connect with us online!
Book a demo to see how ProsperOps can help your team achieve more savings with zero manual effort.
