Category: News

Our product teams have spared no effort in the past few months developing new capabilities, so that we can bring the latest advancements to FinOps X. Let’s take a moment to recap the product announcements made at FinOps X and how they can help accomplish your FinOps goals.

Starting today, you can create exports of your AWS cost and usage data with the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) 1.0 schema as a preview feature. For those of you who aren’t yet familiar with the FOCUS standard, FOCUS is a new open-source cloud billing data specification that provides consistency and standardization to simplify cloud cost reporting and analysis across multiple sources. With Data Exports for FOCUS 1.0 (preview), you can configure recurring delivery of your AWS cost and usage data with the FOCUS 1.0 schema to your designated Amazon S3 bucket, and use these exports for your desired FinOps activities, such as cost reporting and allocation.

We’re excited to announce that starting today AWS Billing and Cost Management provides Data Exports for Cost Optimization Hub. With Data Exports for Cost Optimization Hub, you can deliver consolidated cost optimization recommendations in CSV or parquet format to Amazon S3 on a recurring basis. You can define what data you want to include in the export using basic SQL query or column/row filters in the console. You can share exports with stakeholders, load them into your BI dashboards, or add to your Cloud Financial Management data lake.

Starting today, AWS Compute Optimizer delivers new recommendations for Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) MySQL and PostgreSQL databases. These recommendations help you detect idle RDS instances and identify the optimal instance types and provisioned IOPS settings for your existing RDS DB instances, so you can reduce costs for idle and over-provisioned RDS DB instances or increase the performance of under-provisioned workloads.

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.

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.

In case you missed the launch announcement from AWS Cloud Financial Management solution category in Q2, this blog presents you a quick summary.

Today, we are excited to update everyone on the new pricing model for AWS Billing Conductor (ABC). The new pricing applies an account-based, volume tiering for all accounts assigned to ABC billing groups. The new pricing is effective starting June 1, 2023. To ensure existing ABC customers have sufficient time to experiment with this new pricing model, ABC will be free of charge to existing ABC users for 2 months (April and May, 2023). For new ABC customers, there will be a free trial of 2 months. The free tier begins when you assign an account to any billing group.

One of the most common customer requests we receive is related to supporting containerized applications. Compute Optimizer now has recommendations to help you identify optimal CPU and memory configurations for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) services running on AWS Fargate.

Update: By April 19, 2023, you will no longer be able to roll back to the old Cost Explorer UI. Feel free to submit feedback in the console. We’ll continue improving the experience. The following blog was published on Nov.8, summarizing the Cost Explorer UI changes made in October this year. We’ve since incorporated your […]