Recap of AWS re:Invent 2023 Cloud Financial Management Product Launch Announcements

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 released last week at AWS re:Invent 2023.

Make faster, better-informed decisions through a unified view

As you build and scale on AWS, it is critical for you to stay in the know of your application performance and cost. A single pane view of your spending trends and savings opportunities across all accounts in your organization can save you a lot of time on deciding where to start and focus on. Previously, you might have looked up information or tools in various AWS service console pages for a specific CFM question. Now with the new AWS Billing and Cost Management Console Home, you get an overview of key CFM information and recommendations all in one place with an intuitive, use case-based side navigation. You can quickly switch from one console page to another, and transition from insights to implementation with the right deep links. A similar consolidation effort has been made to the cost optimization space with the new Cost Optimization Hub, which identifies and prioritizes cost optimization opportunities from 10+ sources, such as, Amazon EC2 rightsizing, AWS Graviton migration, and Savings Plans recommendations. You can easily view cost saving opportunities and rest assured that these recommendations have overlaid your unique pricing and deduplicated their cost saving estimates, so you have a more realistic view of your total saving opportunities. If you want to bring in your own perspectives into the EC2 rightsizing recommendations, you can also customize your preferences in AWS Compute Optimizer, e.g. specifying the lookback period, utilization thresholds and headroom, EC2 instance types, ensuring our recommendations are tailored to suit your specific resource guardrails.

Understand your AWS investment with the right level of visibility

When you are ready to use AWS Cost Explorer to understand your AWS cost trends and drivers, you’ll be delighted to know that you can now conduct the multi-year trend analysis by opting in to receive up to 38 months of historical data. You can also zoom into how cost and usage have evolved in the past 3 years with different group-by and filters. With the new granular resource level data for all services, you will have more visibility to detect cost drivers and anomalies. If you’re leveraging AWS Free Tier offerings, you can now track free tier usage against free usage limits programmatically through GetFreeTierUsage API, and prepare or act accordingly before you’ll switch to the pay-as-you-go pricing. If you’ve been attempting to build your cost dashboard in Amazon QuickSight, we thought it may be easier if we did the work for you. You can now deploy a pre-built Cost and Usage Dashboard in QuickSight directly from your Billing and Cost Management console. The dashboard is backed by the summary view of your Cost and Usage Report (CUR) and comes with a set of tabs that provides billing summary, MoM Trends, and other product family specific views, such as Data Transfer & Networking, Databases.

For those of you, who’d like to export your AWS cost and usage data for deeper analysis, maybe to integrate with 3rd party datasets or embed the data into your own BI tools, you should definitely look into the new AWS Billing and Cost Management Data Exports. It gives you the power to customize and deliver recurring data exports with column selections and row filters from your Cost and Usage Report (CUR 2.0) table, letting you control what data to be included in each export and maintain consistency for your data ingestion. And finally, all associated resources for an application defined in AppRegistry will have new AWS application resource tags that are automatically activated as Cost Allocation Tags in Billing and Cost Management Console. You can use these tags as a filter to understand cost related to any specific application and set up budget and cost monitors to prevent runaway cost.

Watch re:Invent launch announcement session videos

In case we missed you in Vegas las week, you can watch the recordings from our breakout sessions at your own pace.

AWS Billing and Cost Management Console Home (6:00 -10:02)
AWS Cost Explorer enhanced breadth and depth of data (10:02-17:03)
AWS Billing and Cost Management Data Exports 17:00-21:08
Cost and Usage Report 2.0 (21:10 -23:03)
Cost and Usage Dashboard in Amazon QuickSight (23:10 – 28:23)
Application Cost Allocation Tags (33:43 – 35:04)

Customizable preferences in AWS Compute Optimizer (17:53 -24:53)
Cost Optimization Hub (28:00-38:00)

Demo: how to deploy cost and usage dashboard in Data Exports 28:06 – 32:25
Demo: Cost and usage dashboard in QuickSight 32:40-40:14
Demo: Share dashboard with other viewers 40:36 – 41:12
Demo: Further edit and build visuals with Amazon Q in QuickSight 41:12-48:40

Conclusions:

Seeing is believing. Now that you’re caught up with the latest from the AWS Cloud Financial Management product team. Try these new features out (link to console) and let us know if they have improved how you understand and manage your AWS spend.