AWS Cloud Financial Management August Recap

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The month of August has just flown by. Most kids are now back to school (online learning is convenient, but certainly can’t replace the precious interaction kids make with teachers and peers at school), and the Pumpkin Spice Latte is back at Starbucks (and yes, it’s a big deal. Starbucks made a whole announcement about it). If you are into the NFL Fantasy, then you’ve probably done your homework and carefully drafted your team. For procrastinators, it’s about time to get your inspiration and gather information from ESPN top-300 cheat sheet for both PPR and non-PPR formats, team projections made by experts, players’ historical performance, injuries, etc.

Capabilities Enhancement

In the month of August, AWS Cloud Financial Management (CFM) team has made several feature enhancements that can make your CFM journey a bit easier. Similar to our last recap post “2021 Year-to-Date AWS Cloud Financial Management Updates Recap“, we will share these updates by CFM solution area.

Strategic Planning & Evaluation

Several AWS Pricing Calculators have made feature updates: 1) Amazon SageMaker Pricing Calculator now supports Asynchronous Inference, a near-real time inference option that queues incoming requests and processes them asynchronously, 2) AWS IoT Analytics Pricing Calculator now supports a new region, Mumbai, and 3) S3 Pricing Calculator has added a new sub-service object, AWS Lambda.

If you are using any of the following AWS services, take a look at the updated pricing information: 1) Amazon SageMaker Asynchronous Inference pricing, 2) Amazon MemoryDB for Redis pricing, 3) Amazon Workspaces for new Windows Server 2019 bundles and 64-bit Microsoft Office 2019 pricing, and 4) AWS IoT Analytics for Mumbai pricing.

Track and Allocate Costs

Split Charge Rules for allocation of shared costs is now available within AWS Cost Categories. The feature enables you to write rules for splitting costs from a source Cost Category value into target values with a charge allocation method (fixed, even split, or proportional cost-based split). Read more about this feature launch from this news post and Cost Categories product page.

Optimize and Save Costs

Certain applicable customers can now access your discount information across your AWS Cost Management tools. You can view the credit application type (e.g. before or after discounts) and see expired AWS credits (ones with expiration dates in a previous billing cycle) and exhausted AWS credits (ones fully consumed in a previous billing cycle) for the last six months on the credit page within your AWS Billing and Cost Management console.

EC2 15 Year Anniversary

August 25, 2021 marks the 15th birthday of Amazon EC2. Hundreds of thousands of customers joined our virtual celebration, commemorating the last 15 years of customers and partner innovation. Read more about the history of innovation and cost optimization journey of Amazon EC2 from these two blog posts: 15 years of silicon innovation with Amazon EC2, and Amazon EC2-15 years of Optimizing and Saving Your IT Costs. Jeff Barr, our Chief Evangelist also shared his learnings of EC2 in this blog.

Voice of the Customer

Peer Connect

We concluded another peer connect event, our monthly event series, where we invite CFM professionals across industries to connect with one another and share successes and similar challenges. In August, attendees were able to hear “cost control strategies” from AWS product management team and our guest speaker, Ulaga Subramanian, Associate Director of GTS Cloud Governance and Business Office, from Verizon Global Tech Solutions. As Ulaga summarized, “Effective cloud cost control FinOps model requires, establishing a sturdy foundation with proactive/reactive automated cost control mechanisms, implementing a cost cognizant operating model by developers (who should be) ambassadors as Cloud Cost Custodians, and instantiating a Cloud Native cost conscious culture across the entire organization starting from the CFO/CIO and all stakeholders.”

Our September Peer Connect session will focus on tagging and account strategies. Speakers from PBS Digital and Roku will join us, and as usual, we will have breakout rooms for attendees to share your own experiences. If you are interested, you can register here.

Case Studies

For those of you who like to read peer learnings in details can check out the latest Siemens story. The global architecture team at Siemens shared their cost reduction principles and how they leveraged various AWS Cloud Financial Management tools to optimize their cloud environments.

Conclusion

Before I let you go, if you are looking for some good metaphor to explain to your colleagues or families what Cloud Financial Management is and what you do for a living, be sure to check out the blog post “A Perspective on Cloud Financial Management”. All right. Depending on where you are in your life, maybe it’s time to go pick up your kid, learn about their day, grab a cup of Pumpkin Spice Latte on your way there, or crunch your NFL fantasy draft modeling so you can brag about your success a few months from now.