Can you believe one-third of 2025 is already behind us? Just in case the Easter Bunny didn’t leave anything good in your basket this year, we’ll treat you to a little Easter egg — if you’re willing to follow the clues — along with the scoop from this past month.
Here’s what you might have missed in April:
- Google highlighted 229 topics of interest from its latest Google Cloud Next conference.
- AWS Budgets gained a couple of new features that may help you customize your budgeting experience.
- European AWS customers received access to the Advance Pay tool.
Read on for the details!
Top Cloud Cost Headlines From April 2025
Google released a summary of its Google Cloud Next ’25 event — and a lengthy list of announcements
Google Cloud Next ’25 took place in early April and featured a number of speeches and presentations regarding the latest developments in AI and the cloud. If you’re an AI developer within Google’s ecosystem, you might want to check out these highlights from the event.
For a more detailed review of the topics discussed during Next ’25, dive into this lengthy summary of 229 announcements made during the conference. The list covers a number of categories, including AI system updates, infrastructure changes, development tools, databases, and more.
While it’s too early to know exactly how each new development will affect your cloud spending, you can make a note of the changes that affect you and then watch your costs change live on the CloudZero platform. This should give you an idea of which way your costs are trending as major AI providers like Google release new updates.
AWS Budgets expanded its support to include a few new cost metrics and filters
Bit by bit, AWS has been gradually implementing new and more convenient ways of tracking your cloud usage and costs.
On April 29th, AWS announced the latest iterative improvements: new cost metrics and filtering features within the AWS Budgets tool.
While these changes aren’t earth-shattering for users who already track their costs in a more detailed capacity, they will help AWS users track budget categories such as net amortized costs after discounts and filter to exclude certain values when creating a budget.
Every improvement is welcome, so we’re happy to see it.
European AWS customers can now pay in advance for usage
In another small but welcome change, AWS will allow European users to use Advance Pay and set up automatic future payments for their AWS accounts. This feature will allow customers to fill an account with funds to be used for later invoice payments.
As with any prepaid usage plan, it’s best if you can closely estimate your future usage before opting into automated payments.
However, unlike with reserved plans where you’re locked into a certain usage level, the Advance Pay system will simply auto-deduct the amount you owe from your account rather than capping your usage.
You’ll definitely want to have a clear understanding of the costs you’re generating so you don’t run into any “sticker shock” when the money leaves your account. Predicting your usage can be a challenge , but it becomes easy once you have a comprehensive cost monitoring platform and a solid FinOps strategy.
Plans are always changing …
Keep Your FinOps Plan Steady And Effective With CloudZero
When you proactively manage your own cloud costs with CloudZero, you take total control of your company’s finances.
No longer will you have to wait, hoping for a cloud provider to implement more robust tracking tools or scramble to adapt when you flag an anomaly and your prices skyrocket. From the day you sign up, you’ll have complete and transparent access to all your cloud costs and usage data from every cloud provider you use, all in one convenient dashboard.
Say goodbye to estimating costs and hello to complete confidence in your infrastructure, purchasing, and development decisions.
with CloudZero to know your cloud costs in detail and break free from the guesswork — forever.
P.S. Still looking for that Easter egg? You’ll find it here.