AWS Cloud Financial Management 2023 Q2 Recap

Don’t you just love summer when you have the perfect excuse to enjoy barbecue, ice cream, and friend gatherings. Cloud Financial Management team enjoyed meeting many of you at various events, from AWS Summit London, AWS Summit Washington D.C., re:Inforce in Anaheim, to FinOps X in San Diego. Your honest feedback is highly appreciated and will help us improve the capabilities to better serve your CFM needs. In case you missed the launch announcement in Q2, below is a quick summary.

Fine-grained cost distribution

Meaningful cost reporting and allocation helps track and improve the efficiency of cloud resources usage and establishes the necessary cost awareness for users. AWS Cost Categories is a flexible way to create your own cost allocation dimension using AWS resources and accounts. It has recently added “Usage Type” to its rules, giving you seven different ways: “Linked Account”, “Charge Type”, “Service”, “Usage Type”, “Cost Allocation Tags, “Region”, and other “Cost Categories, to categorize cost and usage. Cost allocation is especially important, when multiple users and applications consume shared resources. The Split Cost Allocation Data for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) tasks and AWS Batch jobs was launched early April. The feature provides cost visibility at the ECS task level, so you can allocate the shared EC2 cost based on how the containerized applications consume the compute and memory resources. Learn more from this blog “Improve cost visibility of Amazon ECS and AWS Batch with AWS Split Cost Allocation Data”.

Chargeback with configurable pricing rules

The proforma invoice that factors in pricing mark-up, discounts, and shared cost distribution not only allows you to view your IT business margin, it also helps develop accountability for all users. AWS Billing Conductor lets you configure the account grouping and pricing rules that are aligned with your organization chargeback logic. For those of you who prefer particular treatment of AWS service free tier benefits, you can now control how you apply service-specific free tier benefits to a targeted set of accounts. View details of how you can use AWS Billing Conductor from this user guide: “AWS Billing Conductor – Creating billing groups, pricing configurations, and custom line items”.

Scalable access control policy updates

Earlier this year, AWS launched fine-grained IAM actions, in replacement with the existing IAM actions, for intentional permission management to Billing, Cost Management, and Account Consoles. To enable faster policy updates, AWS launched bulk migration scripts that can scan affected policies across member accounts within the organization and generate suggestions for new fine-grained actions to replace the old ones. You can view and accept the suggestions and efficiently update affected policies in all member accounts. Refer to this user guide “Use scripts to bulk migrate your policies to use fine-grained IAM actions” for details.

Rightsizing recommendations with filters

AWS Compute Optimizer monitors resource usage against best practices and provides rightsizing recommendations for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, AWS Lambda functions, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes, and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) services on AWS Fargate. You can now filter rightsizing recommendations by tags (tag keys, tag key and value pairs). For EC2 instance recommendations, you can filter recommendations by inferred workload types, zooming in cost-saving opportunities for applications that might be running on your EC2 instances. Microsoft SQL Server is now supported as an inferred workload type, in addition to Amazon EMR, Apache Cassandra, Apache Hadoop, Memcached, NGINX, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Kafka. Learn more from the user guide “AWS Compute Optimizer – viewing resource recommendations”.

Point-in-time cost estimation

To help you generate a quick estimate for your workloads, AWS Pricing Calculator guides you through various pricing components of AWS services and resources. You can save and share these estimates with stakeholders and for future use. When accessing previously saved estimates, you can refresh the estimates to reflect the latest pricing, so your estimate is up to date. This also allows you to track the changes to your cost estimates over time. Learn more about the instructions with the user guide “AWS Pricing Calculator – Sharing your estimates”.

Better visibility of your AWS carbon footprint

In recent years, Cloud Financial Management professionals have started taking upon responsibilities to track sustainability metrics against the organizational carbon reduction targets. AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool (CCFT) tracks your carbon emissions from your use of AWS services, and the current and projected emission savings, as you operate on the AWS infrastructure powered by renewable energy. The downloadable CSV files are now available for you to analyze carbon data at a multi-dimensional level with month, service, and geography. Read this blog “Increased visibility of your carbon emissions data with AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool” for details.

Conclusions

If you are interested to learn ways to optimize your spend on AWS and connect with like-minded talents, we’d like to invite you to the in-person peer connect event on July 25, the day before the AWS Summit New York. You’ll hear updates from our cost optimization product team and advices from Apptio and Spot by NetApp. Register now to reserve your space.