AWS Cloud Financial Management

Bowen Wang

Author: Bowen Wang

Bowen is a Principal Product Marketing Manager for AWS Billing and Cost Management services. She focuses on enabling finance and business leaders to better understand the value of the cloud and ways to optimize their cloud financial management. In her previous career, she helped a tech start up enter the Chinese market.

AWS Well-Architected Cost Optimization Labs Updated

  AWS’s breadth of resource options and purchase models allow you to design your infrastructure in a most cost-efficient way possible.  You can start by identifying idle and underutilized resources with services such as AWS Cost Explorer Recommendations, matching your resource capacity with business demand using services such as Instance Scheduler, and taking advantage of […]

Launch: AWS Budgets Actions

Imagine you can put some real teeth to your AWS Budgets.  Rather than warning you of a forecasted or actual cost overage, AWS can act on your behalf and stop the activities that caused the overage. We are pleased to announce that this came to a reality with the launch of AWS Budget Actions. Our […]

Cost Allocation Blog Series #5: Building an AWS cost allocation strategy with Apptio Cloudability

As you establish and implement your cost allocation model, AWS equips you with tools and resources to organize accounts and resources (e.g. AWS Organizations), improve visibility into detailed cost and usage data (e.g. AWS Cost and Usage Reports), and group cost and usage information into meaningful groups by your own rule (e.g. AWS Cost Categories).  For customers who want to understand what premium 3rd party solutions are available to help you better organize and report your cost in preparation for chargeback or showback in your organizations, AWS Partner Network has verified partners that can offer cloud management solutions to help customers manage and optimize AWS environments.   In this blog post, we will share how you can leverage Apptio Cloudability to build your cost allocation strategy.

Preview: Anomaly Detection and alerting now available in AWS Cost Management

The democratization of cloud technology brings autonomy and agility to end users, who can access and spin up resources quickly.  Builders get to experiment ideas, develop applications, and deploy products globally to meet local customers’ needs.  Organization leaders want to unleash the team’s creativity and accelerate the time-to-market, while keeping the cloud cost within limits. […]

Cost Allocation Blog Series #4: Visualize Data Transfer Costs with Cost and Usage Reports, Athena, and QuickSight

The right level of visibility into the shared costs allows organizations to understand the main drivers for these costs and provides insights into cost optimization opportunities. In this blog post, we will share tips on how you can visualize data transfer cost details available in AWS Cost and Usage Reports (AWS CUR) for analysis using Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight. 

Launch: Daily Cost and Usage Budgets

AWS Budgets allows you to stay informed of your cost and usage based on the custom budget limits.  You will receive alerts if your cost and usage exceed or are forecasted to exceed these monthly, quarterly, and/or annual budget thresholds you set yourselves.  The best way to leverage AWS Budgets is to set your expected […]

Enforce and Validate AWS Resource Tags

Cost Allocation Blog Series #3: Enforce and Validate AWS Resource Tags

Tagging is one of the most foundational steps that you need to take in order to establish a meaningful cost allocation model. Customers asked us how you can ensure teams consistently create and apply the resources tags based on the tagging strategy. In this blog, we will share recommendations on how your team, especially your AWS administrators, can enforce and validate your resource tags.

Cost Allocation Blog Series #2: AWS-Generated vs. User-Defined Cost Allocation Tag

Tagging, as a great way to define the ownership and usage purpose of your resources in the format of metadata, allows you to quickly manage and filter your resources and trace costs back to the right entities. In this blog post, we will share his advice on how you use the two types of cost allocation tags: AWS-generated and User-defined.

Cost Allocation Blog Series #1: Cost Allocation Basics That You Need to Know

If it’s Everyone’s job, it’s No One’s job. On our team, we take this lesson to heart and always make sure there is a clear owner for everything we do.  This helps ensure everyone is responsible for specific tasks or goals, and will not be bystanders, assuming someone else will pick up the work. The […]

Update: Elastic Load Balancing Code Change

Update: Elastic Load Balancing Code Change

Elastic Load Balancing is a service that automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, and Lambda functions.  It helps customers achieve fault tolerance for any application by ensuring scalability, performance, and security. Starting August 1, Elastic Load Balancing cost and usage information will start showing up […]