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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.

A cloud vendor’s Cloud Financial Management (CFM) capabilities are crucial for your success in the cloud. Whether you’re planning future investments, optimizing current spending, or allocating costs across your organization, having the right CFM tools makes all the difference. AWS is proud to be recognized with the 1st place in forecasting and estimation use case, and top 3 in driving cost efficiency use case and promotion accountability use case in the latest 2025 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Cloud Financial Management Tools research.

Today, we are excited to announce new capabilities within AWS Billing and Cost Management that enable you to create custom billing views containing cost and usage data from multiple organizations. You can now share custom billing views with AWS accounts outside your organization and combine multiple custom billing views to create consolidated multi-source views. These features allow you to access cost management data across multiple organizations through AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Budgets from a single AWS account.

Accurately allocating cloud costs in AWS is essential for fostering accountability and maximizing the value derived from cloud investments. Cost allocation requires careful consideration of your organization’s structure, workload patterns, and financial requirements. Whether you’re utilizing AWS accounts, Cost Allocation Tags, Cost Categories, or Billing Conductor, the key is selecting patterns that align with your business needs while maintaining simplicity and scalability. Start with the fundamental building blocks of AWS cost allocation, then layer in more sophisticated approaches as your organization’s needs evolve. By implementing these prescriptive patterns thoughtfully, you can create the cost transparency and accountability needed to drive business value from your cloud investments. Remember that cost allocation is not a one-time exercise—regularly review and adjust your approach as your business grows and your cloud journey continues.