Category: Best Practices

As we start this cost allocation discussion with a customer they often ask: How do I allocate cloud costs to various company cost centers? Which of my lines of business, teams, or organizations drove increased spend and usage?
How can I make sure end users are accountable for their spend? How do I deal with shared cost resources?

Voiced by Amazon Polly As your business grows on AWS, so too does the need for cost and usage visibility and custom cost reporting tailored for your organization. Good Cloud Financial Management (CFM) targets for your AWS usage can include (but are not limited to) Reserved Instance and Savings Plans coverage, average hourly cost of […]

Each year, we share a preview of what Cloud Financial Management (CFM) themed sessions you can look for at AWS re:Invent, so you can pre-register and reserve your seats at the sessions you find interesting. This year marks the 10th anniversary of AWS re:Invent and we’re excited to celebrate with our customers back in Las […]

Voiced by Amazon Polly One of the biggest benefits of the cloud is the ability to scale dynamically and reduce costs by paying for only what you use, when you need it. However, when development teams aren’t prepared for this newfound flexibility, cost shock and unexpected cost spikes can occur. If you are new to […]

In this blog, we will share the benefits to upgrade your Amazon OpenSearch Service instances to the latest generations, how you can identify the instances of older generations and configure your Amazon OpenSearch Service domain changes to upgrade the instance types, and how you can receive recommendations and purchase your Amazon OpenSearch Service Reserved Instances.

For those of you who don’t want to miss any news from AWS Cloud Financial Management (CFM) space in 2021, this blog post will provide a quick recap of this year’s updates: from category name updates, to CFM training for builders, to all the service and feature enhancement across CFM solution areas.

Voiced by Amazon Polly   After the blog series on Unit Metrics, the call was put out for future topics.  There were some excellent suggestions received from the community.  Three in particular struck a chord: Building strong links between technology and other business teams Projecting AWS cost.  The role of traditional FP&A in the FinOps […]

AWS cloud usage data is a critical component in the IT Financial Management process for AWS customers. As organizations grow in cloud maturity, the cloud usage data may become complex as usage incurs from distributed teams and businesses. Financial and Technology leaders need access to trends, signals, insights, and cost deviations to quickly understand and analyze the cloud usage. The AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) provide comprehensive data about your AWS costs, including information related to product, pricing, and usage. By including the Resource IDs and choosing hourly time granularity, CUR allows you to analyze your costs in greater detail and accuracy. You can download the CUR reports from the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) console, query the reports using Amazon Athena or load the reports into Amazon Redshift or visualize in Amazon QuickSight.

Voiced by Amazon Polly   As the last blog in the Unit Metric series (intro, what is unit metric, selecting a unit metric to support your business, unit metrics in practice – lesson learned), we’ll share how unit metrics is instrumental in gaining alignment across business functions. High quality unit metrics create an opportunity to […]

Voiced by Amazon Polly We hope by now you have a good grasp of what a unit metric is and how you can create your own to evaluate the efficiency of resources usage or project your future spend. Before you jump into action, here are some of the lessons learned along the way we’ve experienced both […]