Category: AWS Cloud Financial Management

Today AWS announced the general availability release of Data Exports for FOCUS 1.0. You can now create exports of your AWS cost and usage data with the FOCUS 1.0 schema with significant specification conformance improvements compared to the public preview released in June 2024. FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Standard), supported by the FinOps Foundation, is an open-source cloud cost and usage specification that provides standardization to normalize cost and usage data and simplify cloud financial management across multiple sources. With Data Exports for FOCUS 1.0, you can easily aggregate, query, and analyze cost and usage data from various sources.

Today, we’re excited to announce the enhanced AWS Pricing Calculator that is now available as a public preview feature within the AWS Billing and Cost Management Console. The new capability provides accurate cost estimates for new workloads or modifications to your existing AWS usage by incorporating eligible discounts. You can now save time and improve the accuracy of cost estimation for migrating workloads from one Region to another, modifying existing or planning new workloads, and planning for commitment purchases. To get started, login into the AWS Billing and Cost Management Console and click Pricing Calculator under the “Budget and Planning” section in the left navigation, or go to the pricing calculator page and click the link “Log in to the AWS console to estimate your costs incorporating your discounts.”

Today, AWS enhanced Cost Anomaly Detection with the ability to provide multiple root causes for cost anomalies. This new capability empowers FinOps professionals and cloud financial managers to quickly identify and resolve the underlying factors driving unexpected cost increases. For FinOps teams striving to optimize cloud spend and maintain financial accountability, this enhancement offers deeper insights and faster resolution times. This post explains how this improvement can help you resolve anomalies more efficiently and answers some frequently asked questions.

Starting today, you can easily model your next Savings Plans purchases and evaluate the impact on cost, coverage, and utilization in the AWS Billing and Cost Management Console. You can input your own commitment amount or generate a recommended commitment that is designed to maximize your cost savings. Furthermore, you can customize your analysis by selecting a specific lookback period and/or excluding expiring Savings Plans to plan for upcoming renewals.

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.

We want to show you the benefits of CUR 2.0 and provide steps on how to migrate to CUR 2.0, so you don’t lose out! CUR 2.0 builds upon the Legacy CUR, while offering several key improvements for your cost tracking. Both 2.0 and Legacy allow you to analyze AWS costs in greater detail and accuracy, especially by including Resource IDs and hourly time granularity.

If you’re managing your organization’s AWS spend and planning to dedicate time at 2024 re:Invent to learn about solutions that can help you better manage and optimize your AWS cost and usage, take a brief pause and read on this blog post. You will find the lineup of different sessions and workshops that are focused on popular Cloud Financial Management topics, e.g., cost allocation, planning, cost control. You can look up these sessions and reserve seats in the attendee portal of the re:Invent registration site or on your AWS Event mobile app to secure your spot.

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.

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.