FinOps and cloud operations teams spend countless hours on routine maintenance and repetitive tasks. Tagging new resources. Shutting down non-production environments after hours. Cleaning up orphaned infrastructure that’s quietly generating costs.
These aren’t difficult tasks, but they’re repetitive, easy to overlook, and often require custom scripts or manual intervention to keep cloud environments running efficiently.
With Kion’s FinOps+ v3.16 release, we’re introducing Automation Policies, a new capability that gives organizations a dedicated place to automate common cloud operations and FinOps workflows. Instead of simply identifying opportunities to reduce waste, Automation Policies help teams define and enforce cloud actions at scale, automatically.
What Are Automation Policies?
Automation Policies are a new FinOps Automation capability in Kion v3.16 (released June 15, 2026) that allow cloud operations and FinOps teams to define, manage, and automate operational tasks across their cloud environments.
Unlike compliance policies, which are designed to measure and enforce organizational standards, Automation Policies focus on day-to-day operational actions. They provide a dedicated home for cloud automation, allowing teams to execute routine tasks without affecting compliance scores or cluttering compliance workflows.
Automation Policies can be attached anywhere within your Kion hierarchy and automatically inherit to eligible descendant accounts and projects. This makes it easy to apply consistent automation across your organization while maintaining centralized governance.
Automation Policies extend your existing governance framework without requiring custom scripts or third-party automation tools.
Key Benefits of Automation Policies
Automate Routine Cloud Operations
Automation Policies help eliminate repetitive manual work by automating common operational tasks.
Kion v3.16 includes several built-in policy templates to help teams get started quickly, including:
Auto-Tag Resources
Consistent tagging is essential for cost allocation, ownership, reporting, and governance. The Auto-Tag Resources policy automatically applies tags using custom variables, helping improve accountability across shared cloud environments without relying on manual tagging efforts.
Scheduled Lights Off and Lights On
Development and sandbox environments often continue running long after teams have gone home. Automation Policies can automatically power down supported AI, auto-scaling compute, database, and other cloud resources during scheduled off-hours and restore them when needed, helping organizations reduce unnecessary cloud spend with minimal effort.
Delete Orphaned Resources
Unused public IPs, dead-end load balancers, unattached storage volumes, and abandoned internet gateways will accumulate costs over time. Automation Policies automatically identify and eventually remove eligible orphaned resources on a schedule, eliminating waste before it impacts your monthly cloud bill.
Stop Runaway Cloud Spending
Kion’s Budget features already allow you to set spending thresholds and respond with policy or external application action before spending limits are reached within a cloud account. Automation Policies can now allow you to respond directly to those situations with resource-level action.
Using the provided Lights Off policies, you can easily stop cloud resources in their tracks in response to the financial condition of your cloud. And with support for AI notebook services across multiple cloud providers, Kion and Automation Policies help you take control of emerging spend before it becomes a concern.
Keep Compliance Focused on Compliance
Before Automation Policies, many operational automations lived alongside compliance policies because there wasn’t a better place for them.
That worked, but it wasn’t ideal.
Operational tasks like scheduling compute shutdowns or tagging resources aren’t compliance findings, yet they influenced how teams organized and managed policies within Kion.
Automation Policies give these workflows their own dedicated home, making compliance standards easier to understand while simplifying ongoing operational management.
Scale Automation Across Your Organization
Automation Policies integrate directly with Kion’s existing organizational hierarchy.
Create a policy once, attach it where it belongs, and let inheritance handle the rest.
Whether you’re managing a handful of cloud accounts or thousands of projects across multiple business units, Automation Policies help ensure consistent operational practices without requiring duplicate configuration.
Reduce Manual Work Without Custom Scripts
Many organizations rely on scheduled Lambda functions, homegrown automation, or recurring operational tasks to maintain cloud hygiene.
Automation Policies bring those workflows directly into Kion, allowing teams to manage cloud automation from the same platform they already use for governance and financial management.
The result is less operational overhead, fewer moving pieces to maintain, and more consistent execution across your cloud environment.
Why Automation Policies Matter
One of the biggest challenges in FinOps isn’t identifying opportunities to reduce waste. It’s taking it a step further and consistently acting on those opportunities. Automation Policies matter because enforcement is where FinOps and cloud governance actually intersect.
Teams already know when resources aren’t tagged.
They know sandbox environments don’t need to run overnight.
They know orphaned infrastructure creates unnecessary costs.
The challenge has always been turning that knowledge into trustworthy action in your cloud environment.
Automation Policies help close that gap.
Rather than relying on dashboards to identify issues or asking engineers to remember routine maintenance tasks, organizations can automate those actions directly within Kion. Cloud operations become more proactive, governance becomes more consistent, and teams spend less time chasing preventable waste.
It’s another step toward the broader FinOps+ vision: combining visibility, governance, and FinOps automation to help organizations do more with less.
What’s Next for Automation Policies?
Automation Policies are just the beginning.
This initial release establishes the foundation for more advanced policy-driven workflows in future versions of Kion, including richer automation capabilities, approval workflows, notifications, and additional policy templates.
As cloud and AI environments continue to grow in complexity, automation will play an increasingly important role in helping organizations enforce governance at scale without increasing operational burden.
Bringing FinOps from Visibility to Action
Cloud and AI spend visibility is essential, but visibility alone doesn’t reduce costs or improve governance.
Automation Policies help organizations move beyond identifying opportunities by automatically enforcing the operational actions that keep cloud environments healthy, efficient, and accountable.
Whether you’re improving resource tagging, reducing off-hours spend, or eliminating unnecessary infrastructure, Automation Policies make it easier to operationalize and automate FinOps across your cloud and AI environments.
Available beginning with Kion v3.16, Automation Policies represent another step toward Kion’s mission to help organizations proactively manage cloud and AI costs at scale. To learn more about Automation Policies and what’s new, explore the full Kion v3.16 release.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are Automation Policies in Kion?
Automation Policies are a feature introduced in Kion v3.16 that automate common cloud operations tasks such as resource tagging, scheduled resource shutdowns, and orphaned resource cleanup. They help organizations consistently enforce operational best practices while reducing manual effort.
How are Automation Policies different from Compliance Policies?
Compliance Policies evaluate cloud resources against organizational standards and contribute findings to compliance reporting. Automation Policies are designed to perform operational actions.
Separating these workflows gives cloud operations and FinOps teams a dedicated place to automate routine tasks without impacting compliance scores or mixing operational automation with audit requirements.
What cloud actions can Automation Policies automate?
Kion includes built-in templates for automatically tagging resources, scheduling Lights Off and Lights On for supported resources, and deleting orphaned cloud resources. Additional policy templates and automation capabilities can be added over time as Kion continues expanding automation capabilities.
Can Automation Policies be applied to specific cloud accounts or organizational units?
Yes. Automation Policies integrate with Kion’s organizational hierarchy and can be attached at the organization, OU, project, or cloud rule level. Policies automatically inherit to eligible descendant accounts, making it easy to apply consistent cloud governance across large environments.
Can Automation Policies replace custom automation scripts?
For many common cloud operations, yes.
Organizations often build and maintain custom scripts or scheduled functions to automate repetitive cloud tasks. Automation Policies provide a platform-native alternative that is easier to manage, centrally governed, and integrated directly into Kion.
How do Automation Policies support FinOps?
Automation Policies help organizations move beyond identifying cloud and AI waste to automatically preventing it. By automating tasks like tagging resources, scheduling non-production environments, and removing orphaned infrastructure, Automation Policies improve cost visibility, strengthen governance, and reduce unnecessary spend.
Additionally, Automation Policies can be applied to a given cloud account in response to a financial condition allowing you to do things like turn off cloud resources once a budget threshold is reached.
When are Automation Policies available?
Automation Policies are available beginning with Kion v3.16, released June 15, 2026.
