AWS Cloud Financial Management 2022 Q4 recap

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 context. So, let’s jump right in.

Q4 Highlights

We finished 2022 strong with several exciting feature launches across several services in the AWS CFM portfolio.

AWS Billing Conductor: a new service launched March last year, Billing Conductor helps simplify how you modify your billing information and cost reports for chargeback purposes. Since its launch in March, several feature enhancements have been rolled out: e.g., the point-in-time Organization Unit import. In Q4 last year, three new features were rolled out: 1) recurring custom line items: having the same custom line items span across multiple billing periods, 2) global Free Tier pricing rule: disabling Free Tier allocation when creating a global pricing rule to match the agreed-upon terms between you and end customers, 3)new billing entity pricing rule: controlling pricing parameters for your AWS service charges and AWS Marketplace charges, respectively.

AWS Cost Explorer UI Update: Cost Explorer is the cost and usage reporting dashboard that you can easily enable in your AWS Cost Management console. The tool gives you the historical (up to 12 months) and forecasted view (up to 12 months) of your AWS cost and usage information at an aggregated or granular level. As part of an AWS console-wide migration to the new design system, Cost Explorer has made several UI updates, such as a summary of values on top of the graph, color palate and chart display, date range selector, and filter dimension selection and preference. Details can be found in my other blog.

Legal and invoicing entities now available in AWS Budgets: Budgets allows you to create a custom budget threshold and receive alerts when your cost or usage exceeds the limit, or your commitment purchases drop below the targeted utilization/coverage rate. With these two new dimensions, you can now customize budget thresholds and track costs associated with specific AWS Seller of Record via the invoicing entity, and specific AWS Marketplace sellers via the legal entity.

Amazon ECS services running on AWS Fargate recommendations: AWS Compute Optimizer provides rightsizing recommendations to help you avoid over- or under- provisioning your usage of Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, and AWS Lambda functions. It has recently added recommendations for Amazon Elastic Container Services (ECS) services on AWS Fargate to help you identify the optimal ECS task CPU and memory configurations for ECS running on AWS Fargate. Learn more from this blog.

AWS Compute Optimizer integration with 3rd party APM partners: the integration gives you the option to leverage additional metrics, such as memory utilization data, collected by APM partners Datadog, Dynatrace, Instana, and New Relic. You can also receive more robust compute rightsizing recommendations that maximize your cost saving potential without impacting your application performance. Read all about it in this blog.

Enriched anomaly details and percentage-based alerting in AWS Cost Anomaly Detection: Cost Anomaly Detection leverages advanced ML technology when analyzing your historical spend pattern and factoring in seasonable trends and organic growth. For each anomaly detected, AWS sends you a root cause analysis. Now Account name, monitor name, and monitor type are included in the detected cost anomaly details across email, console, and notification messages. This allows you to quickly form a plan to address the potential cost overrun. The percentage-based alert threshold provides an alternative to the dollar amount threshold and dynamically adapts as your spend changes.

1-click Refresh for Savings Plans recommendations: Savings Plans recommendations provide purchase options that can offer up to 72% discount for your usage of Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, AWS Lambda, and Amazon SageMaker services.  Now you can click one button to update your recommendations for Savings Plans within minutes to include any newly purchased and expired Savings Plans with your recent usage.

Easier cost estimate with AWS Pricing Calculator: Pricing Calculator lets you estimate the cost for your usage of AWS services. The dedicated pricing calculator for EC2 instances allows you to easily select a tenancy option and generate a price estimate for EC2 instances and other commonly associated services, such as Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes and Data Transfer. For cost estimate of a fleet of EC2 instances or EBS-based resources, you can now bulk upload these and add other services afterwards, if needed. Currently, Amazon EC2 instances with EBS volumes, EC2 Dedicated hosts, and EBS standalone imports are supported.

New dimension for AWS Cost Category rules: Cost Categories allows you to group cost and usage information into meaningful categories based on your needs. You can customize the grouping of your usage and your AWS accounts with your own logic rules with dimensions of your choice. The newly added dimension, “Region”, means that you can now create cost categories rules and nested expressions using the following 6 dimensions: Account, Cost Allocation Tag, Charge Type, Service, Cost Categories, and Region. The retroactive feature, launched earlier this year, gives the flexibility to create your Cost Category grouping at any time and apply the view to your historical usage for up to 12 months. Cost Categories is available in many cost management tools, e.g. AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets.

Conclusions

As usual, we’d love to learn how you are using these new features. Please continue submitting your feedback to your contact person at AWS, or reach out to our support team for questions. If you missed launch announcement in 2022, feel free to check out my other blog recaps for Q1, Q2, and Q3. Also, be sure to check out our upcoming Cloud Financial Management events.