Category: Best Practices

  AWS’s breadth of resource options and purchase models allow you to design your infrastructure in a most cost-efficient way possible.  You can start by identifying idle and underutilized resources with services such as AWS Cost Explorer Recommendations, matching your resource capacity with business demand using services such as Instance Scheduler, and taking advantage of […]

As you establish and implement your cost allocation model, AWS equips you with tools and resources to organize accounts and resources (e.g. AWS Organizations), improve visibility into detailed cost and usage data (e.g. AWS Cost and Usage Reports), and group cost and usage information into meaningful groups by your own rule (e.g. AWS Cost Categories).  For customers who want to understand what premium 3rd party solutions are available to help you better organize and report your cost in preparation for chargeback or showback in your organizations, AWS Partner Network has verified partners that can offer cloud management solutions to help customers manage and optimize AWS environments.   In this blog post, we will share how you can leverage Apptio Cloudability to build your cost allocation strategy.

The right level of visibility into the shared costs allows organizations to understand the main drivers for these costs and provides insights into cost optimization opportunities. In this blog post, we will share tips on how you can visualize data transfer cost details available in AWS Cost and Usage Reports (AWS CUR) for analysis using Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight. 

Tagging is one of the most foundational steps that you need to take in order to establish a meaningful cost allocation model. Customers asked us how you can ensure teams consistently create and apply the resources tags based on the tagging strategy. In this blog, we will share recommendations on how your team, especially your AWS administrators, can enforce and validate your resource tags.

Tagging, as a great way to define the ownership and usage purpose of your resources in the format of metadata, allows you to quickly manage and filter your resources and trace costs back to the right entities. In this blog post, we will share his advice on how you use the two types of cost allocation tags: AWS-generated and User-defined.

If it’s Everyone’s job, it’s No One’s job. On our team, we take this lesson to heart and always make sure there is a clear owner for everything we do.  This helps ensure everyone is responsible for specific tasks or goals, and will not be bystanders, assuming someone else will pick up the work. The […]

We have further enhanced our forecasting algorithm to allow a same day start date so customers can always access and view their historical and predicted costs in their Cost Management console and via Cost Explorer API without any gaps. Prior to this change, the current date was an invalid start date for calls to GetCostForecast […]

Collecting and analyzing data is critical to gaining valuable insights into your business and evaluating the effectiveness of your processes. Similar to how you measure your organizational activities, it is important to measure your AWS cost and usage efficiency metrics. This blog post introduces 5 key cost management metrics that you can use to help […]

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world” – Archimedes. 451 Research’s recent whitepaper “Cloud Financial Management, Small Changes Can Make Big Impacts” (April 2020) highlights how organizations who are able to embrace the CFM lever correctly are able to accelerate both top […]

AWS is unlike any other place I’ve ever worked. I’m not just saying this just because my 10-month-old Samoyed puppy is snoozing at my feet as I write this from my daily 20th floor downtown Seattle perch or because an engineer just stopped by with a spare General Porpoise donut for me that survived standup […]