Category: Announcements

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.

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.