Category: Uncategorized

Network infrastructure resources like NAT Gateways represent a substantial portion of cloud spending, yet optimizing these costs presents unique challenges. Unlike compute resources, NAT Gateways often play critical roles in high availability and disaster recovery architectures, making it difficult to confidently identify which ones are truly unused versus those serving as disaster recovery or backup components. Starting today, AWS Compute Optimizer expands its idle resource detection capabilities to include NAT Gateways. Building on our recent launch of idle recommendations for compute, storage, and database resources, you can now identify and clean up unused NAT Gateway resources to drive additional cost savings while maintaining application reliability.

Starting today, AWS Compute Optimizer introduces a new automation feature that streamlines how you optimize Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes. Instead of dedicating valuable engineering hours to optimization tasks, you can now create automation rules that continuously clean up unattached volumes and upgrade volume types based on Compute Optimizer’s data-driven recommendations, freeing your teams […]

Today, we’re excited to announce the extension of AWS managed monitors in AWS Cost Anomaly Detection to support linked accounts, cost allocation tags, and cost categories. Previously available only for AWS services, AWS managed monitors now enable you to track costs across all your organizational dimensions with minimal ongoing maintenance. As organizations scale from tens to hundreds of accounts and teams, you can create a single AWS managed monitor that automatically adapts as your organization grows, eliminating the need to maintain hundreds of individual customer managed monitors. After initial setup, this feature transforms cost monitoring from a time-consuming operational task into an automated process that ensures comprehensive anomaly detection coverage while enabling clear segmentation of spending alerts by cost ownership.

As organizations continue to scale their cloud infrastructure, many organizations struggle to answer fundamental questions: How efficient are we being with our cloud spend? Which business units are most cost efficient? How do we demonstrate ROI on optimization efforts to leadership? Today, we’re excited to introduce Cost efficiency in Cost Optimization Hub—a comprehensive, automatically generated measure of cloud spend efficiency that helps you track optimization progress over time and drive meaningful cost savings across your organization.

Your Reserved Instances and Savings Plans are designed to give you the most optimal discount rates by prioritizing the benefits to accounts in the organizations. However, you might have faced a challenge when you’re managing AWS costs across multiple business units: your Reserved Instances and Savings Plans don’t always benefit the teams that purchased them. As a result, it requires manual chargeback work to track ROI, maintain internal accountability, and align spending with your business structure. Today, we’re excited to announce the general availability of Reserved Instances and Savings Plans (RISP) Group Sharing – a new feature that gives customers an option to have granular control over how your AWS commitments are shared across your organization.

Today AWS announced Cost and Usage data exports in FOCUS 1.2 specification. You can now create exports of your AWS Cost and Usage data in the FOCUS 1.2 schema. FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification), supported by the FinOps Foundation, is an open specification that standardizes Cost and Usage data to simplify cloud financial […]

The ability to group and analyze costs across resources and accounts is crucial for gaining visibility, identifying optimization opportunities, and making data-driven decisions. Organizations aim to accurately allocate and track cloud costs across different business units, projects, and environments to improve budgeting, enable effective chargeback processes, and make informed optimization decisions. With AWS Cost Categories, a free feature, you can create rules to flexibly group and visualize cost using various dimensions such as account, charge type, service and even other Cost Categories.

In this first part of our two-part series, we will explore the fundamentals of AWS Cost Categories and demonstrate how they can transform your cost management approach.

Amazon Q Developer CLI (Amazon Q CLI) with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) for Billing and Cost Management and Amazon CloudWatch enables teams to quickly generate detailed cost analyses, perform deep dives into usage patterns, and receive optimization recommendations through a streamlined interface. Amazon Q CLI with MCP servers simplifies CloudWatch cost analysis. Using natural language prompts, you can identify cost drivers and receive optimization recommendations for your resources. This streamlined approach minimizes manual exploration, enhances financial control, and improves cloud efficiency.

AWS is committed to empowering the FinOps community with the knowledge, tools, and best practices needed to excel in cloud financial management. Our dedication to the FinOps community goes beyond providing world-class cloud services—we’re invested in your professional growth and success. Through our comprehensive digital training portfolio, we aim to equip FinOps professionals with the expertise needed to drive meaningful cost optimization, establish effective governance frameworks, and demonstrate clear business value from cloud investments. Today, we’re excited to share updates to our Cloud Financial Management training courses and introduce a specialized new course designed specifically for the growing demands of generative AI cost management.

The decision between Containers and Serverless Functions – or the implementation of both – should be driven by a thorough understanding of workload characteristics, cost implications, and operational requirements. As FinOps professionals, you should work closely with development and operations teams to analyze usage patterns, model costs under different scenarios, and consider factors like development velocity, operational overhead, and long-term maintainability. By leveraging the strengths of both Containers and Serverless technologies, you can build flexible, cost-effective cloud architectures that adapt to changing business needs while optimizing resource utilization and expenditure.