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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.

We want to show you the benefits of CUR 2.0 and provide steps on how to migrate to CUR 2.0, so you don’t lose out! CUR 2.0 builds upon the Legacy CUR, while offering several key improvements for your cost tracking. Both 2.0 and Legacy allow you to analyze AWS costs in greater detail and accuracy, especially by including Resource IDs and hourly time granularity.

You can use Amazon Athena, a lightweight serverless, analytics tool, to query your AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR). This enables you to dive into your cost and usage data for spend reporting and optimization analysis. However, you may not know all the opportunities you can optimize your Amazon S3 costs by taking advantage of S3 Lifecycle configuration.

This blog shows how you can automatically propagate account-level tags to AWS resources created by AWS Service Catalog. Service Catalog allows sharing of portfolios across AWS accounts and provides a TagOption library to manage tags on provisioned AWS resources. Resource tagging varies by account, so it is not part of the portfolio product configurations. We designed the solution to reduce the burden on users to a minimum, while also adopting cloud best practices such as infrastructure automation.

In part one of this blog series, we shared instructions on how you can integrate AWS Cost Anomaly Detection (CAD) notification with Atlassian Jira Service Management (read blog). In part two of the blog series, we will shed light on the integration of CAD with ServiceNow IT Service Management. ServiceNow IT Service Management offers a widely […]

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.