Category: Billing & Account Management

Today, we are excited to announce new capabilities within AWS Billing and Cost Management that enable you to create custom billing views containing cost and usage data from multiple organizations. You can now share custom billing views with AWS accounts outside your organization and combine multiple custom billing views to create consolidated multi-source views. These features allow you to access cost management data across multiple organizations through AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Budgets from a single AWS account.

Savings Plans offer a flexible pricing model that provides you up to 72% savings on your AWS compute workload compared to on-demand prices. When your AWS footprint grows through organic expansion, regional scaling, mergers, acquisitions, or setting up AWS Organizations to align with your business requirements, understanding how the recommendations are made at payer and linked account levels helps you manage Savings Plans at scale. If you are managing a multi-account AWS Organization, you might have noticed that Savings Plan recommendations differ between your payer account (also known as management account) and linked account (also known as member account).

Today, we’re excited to announce the general availability of the authenticated AWS Pricing Calculator in the AWS Billing and Cost Management Console. The new capability improves the accuracy of cost estimates for new workloads or modifications to your existing AWS usage by incorporating eligible discounts and commitment savings. You can now easily model cost changes for things such as migrating workloads between regions, modifying existing or planning new workloads, and planning for commitment purchases.

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).

Today, we are excited to announce custom billing views, a new feature within AWS Billing and Cost Management that allows you to grant member accounts in your organization access to cost and usage view spanning multiple member accounts. Many of you have teams that own multiple AWS accounts and told us that you want to have a single view of cost data for each team. At the same time, you want to minimize the number of people who have access to the management account that owns the organization-level cost data. With the newly launched custom billing views, you can now make cost and usage data spanning multiple member accounts available to a designated member account in your organization. Let’s dive into how you can set this up.

Today, AWS announced Invoice Configuration, which provides you the ability to customize your invoices to fit your unique business needs. Invoice Configuration enables you to receive separate AWS invoices for each of your business entities such as subsidiaries, cost centers, legal entities, departments etc., while being a part of the same AWS Organization.

Invoice Configuration enables you to split AWS charges on a business entity level, designate a separate Invoice Receiver, and receive separate invoices for each of your business entities. This not only enables you to process your AWS Invoices faster, but also enables you to track funding for each business entity separately and enables you to customize your AWS Invoices to adhere with unique FinOps processes that you may have across your business entities.

If you’re scratching your head and trying to catch up with all the re:Invent launch announcements from the AWS Cloud Financial Management team, let me walk you through how your FinOps experience may be improved for better with the latest capabilities that were just released last week at AWS re:Invent 2023. I’ve also included recordings of these launch announcements, so you can watch these at your own pace.

Today, AWS launched a unified Billing and Cost Management console to help you manage your AWS cloud finances more easily and efficiently. The unified console includes a new home page with insights and recommendations to help you make faster, better-informed decisions, more intuitive navigation to streamline your workflows, and improved resources to help you learn and implement Cloud Financial Management best practices. This post explains how you can use the unified Billing and Cost Management console to manage your AWS cloud finances and answers frequently asked questions.

Thanks to our product and engineering teams’ tireless efforts in building new capabilities for AWS Cloud Financial Management portfolio, I get to talk about these amazing features. Let’s take a look at what we’ve made available for you in the last quarter.

If you’re planning to attend the AWS re:Invent 2023 and wondering what Cloud Financial Management sessions and activities you should participate, look no further! In this blog post, we’ll take a sneak peek into these programs. Hope it can help you navigate re:Invent like a true CFM pro and learn and meet with like-minded FinOps professionals.