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September 8, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. See details. AWS now generates custom Amazon EC2 resource optimization recommendations, calculating ideal configurations based on your past usage. Using these recommendations in the AWS Cost Management product suite, you can identify opportunities for cost efficiency and act on them by terminating […]

Forecasting is an essential part of staying on top of your cloud costs and usage, and becomes even more important as your business scales. AWS Cost Explorer now gives you the ability to create custom usage forecasts to gain a line of sight into your expected future costs. Learn more about getting started with AWS […]

Starting today, you can opt in to daily, weekly, or monthly AWS Budgets Reports emails using AWS Budgets. This tool allows you (and other organization members) to quickly and easily keep an eye on costs, usage, and reservations—all without having to log in to the AWS Management Console. This post walks you through the process […]

The AWS Cost & Usage Report contains the most comprehensive information available on your costs and usage. To extract value quickly from your AWS Cost & Usage Report, query the underlying data source using Amazon Athena. The Athena serverless interactive query service directly queries the information in your Amazon S3 bucket, and analyzes it using […]

AWS’s dizzyingly fast launch cadence (across 165+ services) can make it difficult for anyone to stay up to date on recent releases. In that vein, I was recently reading through the AWS Cost Management Release Notes, and I was reminded of a recent feature release that’s a quick win if you want to keep a […]

In the cost management world, we spend quite a bit of time diving into the bill, but we don’t talk much about paying your bill. In recent days, I’ve heard a lot of questions about the payment options that AWS provides (and the many related acronyms), so I spent some time getting up to speed […]

AWS Budgets gives you the ability to create custom budgets based on your costs, usage, or reservations. You receive alerts when you exceed (or are forecasted to exceed) your budgeted amount. Using the new AWS Budgets planning features, you can specify variable budget targets for each month or quarter for up to one year in […]

It’s a blustery Thursday in San Francisco and we just kicked off Day 1 of our 2-day AWS Cost Management Workshop at AWS’s SF Loft. With that in mind, I’m going to start this post in the same way we tend to start our workshops: by diving into AWS Cost Explorer. In this post, I […]

September 7, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. See details. Reservations, sometimes referred to as Reserved Instances, allow you to achieve significant savings (sometimes up to 75%) as compared to On-Demand Instance usage costs. The savings is in exchange for committing to a 1- or 3-year term of usage. Reservation […]

Moving to the Cloud has changed the way that organizations relate to, and account for, their costs. With the advent of pay-as-you-go pricing, decentralized resource procurement, and a wider breadth of product functionality than ever before, organizations had to change the way they approached their IT-based financial processes. The AWS Cost Management product suite gives […]