Category: Compute

With re:Invent 2024 in the books, and over 50 launch announcements, here are four that we’re most excited about. The overarching theme of these launches appears to be leveraging Amazon’s automation capabilities to optimize costs and improve efficiency for customers.

With great pleasure, I am happy to share with you the ten features recently added to the AWS Cloud Financial Management portfolio of services. We hope that these ten new features will help accomplish your daily FinOps tasks more effectively. These new features are like our holiday gifts to you. Enjoy your holiday and these special gifts from us. We look forward to hearing about your experiences with them.

Starting today, AWS Compute Optimizer will give recommendations to clean up idle resources. AWS Compute Optimizer historically has been focused on providing rightsizing recommendations to save cost and improve performance. To help you drive further cost savings, we are expanding the focus to now include detecting and recommending cleanup of idle recommendations. With this launch, you will get recommendations for idle EBS volumes, ECS tasks on running on Fargate, EC2 instances, EC2 Auto Scaling groups, and RDS instances.

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.

As many organizations are looking to achieve financial success through effective Cloud Financial Management (CFM) strategies, Infor, the global leading software provider, has been experimenting with different practices, from cost reporting to optimization. In this blog post, we will share their success and learning that helped achieve over $2 million in savings through automation and modernization initiatives.

This blog shows how you can automatically propagate account-level tags to AWS resources created by AWS Service Catalog. Service Catalog allows sharing of portfolios across AWS accounts and provides a TagOption library to manage tags on provisioned AWS resources. Resource tagging varies by account, so it is not part of the portfolio product configurations. We designed the solution to reduce the burden on users to a minimum, while also adopting cloud best practices such as infrastructure automation.

We’re excited to announce granular cost visibility for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) in the AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR), enabling you to analyze, optimize, and chargeback cost and usage for your Kubernetes applications. With AWS Split Cost Allocation Data for Amazon EKS, customers can now allocate application costs to individual business units […]

AWS Compute Optimizer is a powerful tool that offers recommendations to optimize your Amazon EC2 instances, helping you identify suitable instance types, reduce underutilized resources, and enhance performance. In this blog post, we will explore AWS Compute Optimizer and demonstrate how to automatically apply its recommendations, resulting in significant cost savings and improved resource efficiency.

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.

Rightsizing recommendation preferences allows you to adjust both CPU headroom and thresholds, configure a new 32-day lookback period option, and set instance family preferences at the organization, account, or regional level. With this feature, Compute Optimizer provides greater transparency on how the recommendations are generated and the ability for you to configure EC2 rightsizing recommendations for higher savings and performance sensitivity, aligning recommendations with your business needs. Let’s explore what you can achieve through this new feature.