Category: Launch

Today, we’re excited to announce the extension of AWS managed monitors in AWS Cost Anomaly Detection to support linked accounts, cost allocation tags, and cost categories. Previously available only for AWS services, AWS managed monitors now enable you to track costs across all your organizational dimensions with minimal ongoing maintenance. As organizations scale from tens to hundreds of accounts and teams, you can create a single AWS managed monitor that automatically adapts as your organization grows, eliminating the need to maintain hundreds of individual customer managed monitors. After initial setup, this feature transforms cost monitoring from a time-consuming operational task into an automated process that ensures comprehensive anomaly detection coverage while enabling clear segmentation of spending alerts by cost ownership.

Today, we’re announcing the general availability of AWS E-Invoice delivery, a new capability that enables you to integrate your Ariba and Coupa procurement portals with AWS. AWS E-Invoice delivery retrieves purchase orders (PO) from your Ariba and Coupa portals and delivers invoices associated with your desired POs. This new feature eliminates two manual tasks: creating POs in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console and uploading invoices to your procurement portals.

Your Reserved Instances and Savings Plans are designed to give you the most optimal discount rates by prioritizing the benefits to accounts in the organizations. However, you might have faced a challenge when you’re managing AWS costs across multiple business units: your Reserved Instances and Savings Plans don’t always benefit the teams that purchased them. As a result, it requires manual chargeback work to track ROI, maintain internal accountability, and align spending with your business structure. Today, we’re excited to announce the general availability of Reserved Instances and Savings Plans (RISP) Group Sharing – a new feature that gives customers an option to have granular control over how your AWS commitments are shared across your organization.

We’re excited to announce enhanced forecasting capabilities in AWS Cost Explorer, now providing up to 18 months of future cost projections with improved accuracy and AI-powered explanations (preview). This extended forecast horizon addresses the need for long-term financial planning that aligns with enterprise fiscal cycles, while providing transparency into the drivers behind your cost forecasts.

Today AWS announced Cost and Usage data exports in FOCUS 1.2 specification. You can now create exports of your AWS Cost and Usage data in the FOCUS 1.2 schema. FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification), supported by the FinOps Foundation, is an open specification that standardizes Cost and Usage data to simplify cloud financial […]

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.