AWS Cloud Financial Management

AWS publishes more than 200 announcements per month to the “What’s New with AWS” website and RSS feed, so there’s a lot to get excited about. However, finding relevant announcements in these updates can be a challenge for engineers, finance professionals, or FinOps stakeholders. In this blog, we will deploy a solution to collect cost optimization related announcements from the “What’s New with AWS” feed and pass them into a dedicated Slack channel.

We’re excited to announce granular cost visibility for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) in the AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR), enabling you to analyze, optimize, and chargeback cost and usage for your Kubernetes applications. With AWS Split Cost Allocation Data for Amazon EKS, customers can now allocate application costs to individual business units […]

In September 2023, we announced Amazon RDS Extended Support which is now available for specific engine versions of Amazon Aurora MySQL, Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon RDS for MySQL, and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. Today, we take you through the calculations for estimating your company’s spend on Amazon RDS Extended Support. We share prescriptive guidance to very quickly engage with your engineering teams.

Executive sponsors play a pivotal role in ensuring the success and effectiveness of a FinOps practice. In this blog, we outline a framework for your organization to gain executive sponsorship.

AWS Cloud Financial Management Technical Implementation Playbooks (CFM TIPs) – The complete playbook for implementing and improving effective Cloud Financial Management capabilities in your organization. Utilizing the Cloud Financial Management framework and the Cost Optimization pillar in the AWS Well-Architected Framework, we have built an accessible step-by-step playbook to help you to implement a specific set of capabilities in your organization. This results in mechanisms that ensure ongoing, self-sufficient cost optimization and governance.

Given cloud invoice timing and the corporate closing calendar, variances between the AWS CUR and the GL are common for many companies. Our recommendation is to document your financial closing process, and educate leadership on any identified variance drivers. Calculating the variance percentage between the finalized AWS CUR and your GL entry to use as a talking point can also enhance understanding of the financial process.

At AWS re:Invent 2023, there were over 40 FinOps-related announcements. However, some announcements may not even seem FinOps related at first glance. In this blog, we are going to look at AWS re:Invent announcements that are not specifically targeted at cost optimization but can help you optimize. The announcements highlighted in this blog may not appear as ways to save money initially, but they will have a big impact on your spend if you use them to their full potential.

AWS Compute Optimizer is a powerful tool that offers recommendations to optimize your Amazon EC2 instances, helping you identify suitable instance types, reduce underutilized resources, and enhance performance. In this blog post, we will explore AWS Compute Optimizer and demonstrate how to automatically apply its recommendations, resulting in significant cost savings and improved resource efficiency.

When FinOps Practitioners share recommendations for cost optimization, they can often be met with a “No”, a “I can’t right now”, or “It’s not my priority” from a Developers (Devs). According to the FinOps Foundation’s “State of FinOps 2023” report, the number one pain point was getting engineers to take action. But, I am here to say, “it’s not the Devs fault!” We spoke with customers who have overcome this roadblock and want to share the lessons learned with you! This blog will walk through 10 ways you can work with your engineers to establish a FinOps culture at your organization.

If you’re scratching your head and trying to catch up with all the re:Invent launch announcements from the AWS Cloud Financial Management team, let me walk you through how your FinOps experience may be improved for better with the latest capabilities that were just released last week at AWS re:Invent 2023. I’ve also included recordings of these launch announcements, so you can watch these at your own pace.