Author: Bowen Wang

In case you missed the launch announcement from AWS Cloud Financial Management solution category in Q2, this blog presents you a quick summary.

When it comes to cost optimization, you often focus on the top spenders, but the cost of the services that typically fall under the “Others” category can be just as high as the top cost drivers. It’s worth looking into the sources of these costs and identifying opportunities for cost and performance optimization. In this blog, I’ll use a few examples to demonstrate how you can dive deeper and understand the cost elements of these “other” services and what you can do to optimize the spend.

The Customer Carbon Footprint Tool now supports the CSV download option, giving you the ability to review carbon footprint data in detail and ingest the data into other reporting systems for further analysis and information sharing. It has also lowered the carbon reporting threshold from one decimal place to three decimal places, which means the carbon emission data is now available at 0.00X metric tons of CO2e, from the previous 0.X metric tons of CO2e.

We’re excited to announce that the cost data for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) tasks and AWS Batch jobs is now available in the AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR). With AWS Split Cost Allocation Data, you can easily understand and optimize cost and usage of your containerized applications, and allocate application costs back to individual business entities based on how shared compute and memory resources are consumed by your containerized applications. Learn how to opt into and view your Split Cost Allocation Data.

The uncertainty of the world economy has once again emphasized the importance of resource efficiency. Take a look at the latest enhancements of the AWS Cloud Financial Management suite of products and learn how you can incorporate these in your daily CFM process.

Starting today, AWS Cost Anomaly Detection will be automatically enabled for all new AWS Cost Explorer customers by default to help save time and increase cost control. This means that if you own a standalone account or management account and enable AWS Cost Explorer, on or after March 27, 2023, you will automatically have a default configuration of AWS Cost Anomaly Detection that monitors your spend by AWS service and emails you a daily summary when a cost anomaly above a certain threshold is detected.

To ensure the most up-to-date pricing estimate experience available in one place, AWS is ending support for the Simple Monthly Calculator (SMC) beginning March 31, 2023 at 11:59PM Pacific Time, and recommend you take advantage of the AWS Pricing Calculator. To assist with the transition, a conversion feature will be available until December 31, 2023 11:59 PM PST.

AWS has launched two new features for creating AWS Cost Categories rules. It has added a new dimension -“Region” to its category rule, and a new dimension operator “OR” to define cost categories rules across dimensions. You can now create cost categories rules with six types of dimensions – “Linked Account”, “Charge Type”, “Service “, […]

AWS will be retiring AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) actions for the Billing, Cost Management, and Account Consoles under the service prefix aws-portal and two actions under purchase order namespace, purchase-orders:ViewPurchaseOrders, and purchase-orders:ModifyPurchaseOrders. We are replacing them with new fine-grained service specific permissions that give you more control. Read this blog and understand how you can perform updates to your permissions so you can maintain intentional access control to Billing, Cost Management, and Account services.

Hope you all had a memorable holiday and are ready to kickstart your Cloud Financial Management (CFM) effort for 2023. We were busy in Q4 last year and want to make sure you don’t miss anything. If you just started following our blog channel, we’ve provided reference links in this blog so you have the […]