Category: Analytics

​​​FinOps practitioners now have access to a growing lineup of AI tools, but matching the right tool to each use case is the difference between accelerating your practice and adding unnecessary complexity. AWS designed each tool in the AI lineup for different context and a different type of work. ​​In this blog we are going to go […]

Your AWS bill reveals more than spend patterns; it can identify security issues. The AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) contains detailed usage data across your AWS Organization, enabling you to find cost optimization opportunities, allocate costs, and uncover potential security risks. In this post you’ll learn how you can use the AWS CUR to identify potential security issues in your environment. We share examples of potential risks, and the markers in the CUR […]

With re:Invent 2025 behind us and over 60 launch announcements, here are five hidden gems that may have gone unnoticed but still have big cost impacts. While everyone was talking about the database savings plans and AI announcements, these quieter launches are already helping customers optimize their cloud spend in creative ways.

Are you ready to maximize your Cloud Financial Management (CFM) learning and networking time at re:Invent 2025? As usual, I’ve put together this comprehensive guide to help you plan your schedule and make the most of the CFM sessions available this year. This year’s catalog features an exciting mix of content across different formats: from breakout, chalk talks, workshops, builder’s sessions, to code talks.

If you are new to AWS, you may be wondering how you can learn and experiment with cloud services while keeping your spend under your control. Budget Controls for AWS is an open-source solution designed to solve this problem. This solution was designed for customers new to AWS with no prior experience. It automatically watches your spending and takes actions you define when costs reach certain thresholds. Think of it as a safety net that can send you alerts, temporarily stop resources, or even delete them to prevent runaway costs.

In April 2025, AWS added carbon emissions data to AWS Data Exports. This managed feature introduces the ability to automatically export carbon emissions data with AWS Account and AWS Region granularity on a monthly basis to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). When using AWS Organizations, the carbon emissions export delivers data for all member accounts linked to your management account. This blog post explains how to configure the recurring delivery of carbon emissions data to Amazon S3 and visualize the exported data in the sustainability-proxy-metrics dashboard of the Cloud Intelligence Dashboards (CID). Utilizing Data Exports and the CID, you can track emissions across more than one AWS organization, with the ability to build custom visualizations and drill down to member account-level granularity.

In this article, we will show you how to define a chargeback mechanism that allocates Savings Plans purchased in the management account, linked accounts or both to recipient accounts of Savings Plan discounts. You can identify accounts that received Savings Plans discounts and the appropriate amount to chargeback to them based on their specific usage.

In this blog post, we discuss how Amazon used AWS Billing Conductor to build a custom solution, enabling them to view their AWS cost at internal rates in AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR).

We’re excited to announce the release of AWS Cloud Financial Management digital training courses. These are four 1-hour courses that will get you familiarized with key AWS solutions to solve your daily FinOps needs, and equip you with cost optimization techniques for commonly used AWS services.

You can use Amazon Athena, a lightweight serverless, analytics tool, to query your AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR). This enables you to dive into your cost and usage data for spend reporting and optimization analysis. However, you may not know all the opportunities you can optimize your Amazon S3 costs by taking advantage of S3 Lifecycle configuration.