New Cloud Financial Management Digital Training Courses

We’re excited to announce the release of AWS Cloud Financial Management digital training courses. These are four one-hour courses will familiarize you with key AWS solutions that address your daily FinOps needs, and equip you with cost optimization techniques for commonly used AWS services.

Scaling your CFM practices

Cloud Financial Management (CFM) is essential for sustainable cloud adoption. The success of CFM can be scaled through engineers and business leaders, when they have a common understanding of the FinOps tasks, their importance, and a framework approach to solving them. The “shifting left” trend in the FinOps industry focuses on the proactive approach to integrate cost consideration early in the cloud development process. So, decisions can be made with cost in mind, together with other factors, e.g., functionality, availability.

AWS CFM framework and portfolio of services empower you to better plan, analyze, optimize, and govern spend and resource utilization. When you and your team develop FinOps strategies, you want to make sure you assign the right people and incorporate the right tool in the process.

Cloud Financial Management Digital Training Courses

The AWS Cloud Financial Management digital training courses aim to train leaders, builders, and FinOps practitioners with Cloud Financial Management related tooling and best practices. They help develop your FinOps skillsets that are in high demand and improve your organization’s FinOps capabilities that is much needed to drive more value from cloud investment. You can use the courses to learn and validate your knowledge level of AWS CFM tools and resources and demonstrates your expertise level across cost reporting, governance, and optimization.

Who should take the trainings?

These four training courses are designed for those, who are interested in and/or responsible for managing cloud spend for your organizations. There are no prerequisites for the trainings; however, courses are designed with different emphases to cater to both business and technical focuses. You can start learning and develop skills at your own pace.

How can I access the trainings, and do I need to pay for them?

These four one-hour trainings are offered for free and available at AWS Skill Builder.  You can search for “Cloud Financial Management” in the search bar and access these free trainings in the results (see the screenshot below).

Figure 1. Screenshot of how to search for “Cloud Financial Management” courses in AWS Skill Builder

Guidelines for taking the trainings

You are welcome to start with any of the four courses. However, for a progressive learning experience, we recommend you to start with the first two fundamental courses. Once you have the foundational knowledge, you can either stop there or challenge yourself with the more technical cost optimization solution courses, which are intended for engineering personas.

• Course 1: Cloud Financial Management: FinOps fundamentals and strategies (Part I) (Skill Builder Link)

You will learn about resources to help you better evaluate and manage your cloud investments, e.g., migration business cases, forecast & budgeting, cloud cost reporting and visualization, and cost governance.

• Course 2: Cloud Financial Management: FinOps fundamentals and strategies (Part II) (Skill Builder Link)

You will learn main CFM use cases, such as cost optimization, cost allocation, and have a better understanding of AWS pricing strategies and ways to improve your cost effectiveness. For those of you who’re also in charge of your organization’s sustainability targets, there is also a chapter for you to learn how to track carbon emissions incurred by your AWS adoption.

• Course 3: Cost Optimization Solutions for FinOps (Part I) (Skill Builder Link)

You will learn the technical implementations to optimize costs associated with your usage of AWS Compute (Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda), Storage (Amazon S3, Amazon EFS, Amazon EBS), and Database services (Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ElastiCache).

• Course 4: Cost Optimization Solutions for FinOps (Part II) (Skill Builder Link)

You will learn the technical implementations to optimize costs associated with your usage of AWS Data Transfer (Internet, between/within AWS Regions), Networking (e.g., Amazon VPC, NAT Gateways, Elastic Load Balancing, VPN), Analytics (Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka), Containers (Amazon EKS, Amazon ECS), and AI/ML and generative AI services (Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Q, Amazon CodeWhisper).

Conclusions

We’re committed to helping you achieve greater cost savings through CFM solutions and educational content. By working together with you to maximize your investments today, we can create lasting benefits for your organization and ours in the long run.

We appreciate all the subject matter experts who’re involved in the ideation, creation, and publishing of these courses. Please let us know your feedback, as we improve these and create other courses.