Category: AWS Cost and Usage Report

A video hosting platform cut Amazon S3 costs by 70% by analyzing usage patterns and optimizing their architecture. They discovered that a tiny fraction of files were generating excessive retrieval costs in S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval and moved them to S3 Intelligent-Tiering while improving CloudFront caching. These strategic changes reduced GET requests by 90% and delivered substantial six-figure annual savings.

In Part 1 of our series on improving cost visibility and observability, “Improve Cost Visibility and Observability with AWS Cost Categories – Part 1: Fundamentals and Basic Grouping Techniques”, we explored the fundamentals of AWS Cost Categories and demonstrated how to implement basic grouping techniques using regional dimensions, multiple dimensions, and split charges to enhance cost visibility across your AWS environment. Building on these fundamentals, this second installment of our AWS Cost Categories series explores advanced techniques and automation capabilities that can further enhance your cost management strategy.

It’s Friday morning. You’re expecting an easy day when suddenly—ding—a budget alert hits your inbox. Not only have you been notified, but so has your manager and the FinOps team. Your relaxed Friday just disappeared.
Sound familiar? This scenario happens more often than it should. With Kiro CLI  or Amazon Q Developer IDE, AWS’s generative AI-powered assistant, you can prevent these panic-inducing moments while saving significant money. Here are five powerful ways to use AI to optimize your AWS infrastructure which came from a re:Invent 2025 talk: Optimize AWS Costs: Developer Tools and Techniques.

Another year has flown by. As we wrap up another exciting AWS re:Invent, I’m excited to share the latest enhancements in AWS Cloud Financial Management (CFM) space. This year’s announcements reflect our commitment to providing comprehensive solutions across the four CFM pillars: track and allocate, govern and operate, forecast and plan, and optimize and save. We’ve also made significant improvements in AI for CFM, which impacts all four CFM pillars.

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.

We’re excited to announce support for Kubernetes labels in split cost allocation data for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). With this launch, you can now import Kubernetes labels as user-defined cost allocation tags into split cost allocation data, allowing you to attribute the cost of your applications running on an Amazon EKS cluster using these labels in AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR). This enables you to allocate your Kubernetes costs based on your specific business requirements and organizational design.

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.

In this article, we will show you how to define a chargeback mechanism that allocates Savings Plans purchased in the management account, linked accounts or both to recipient accounts of Savings Plan discounts. You can identify accounts that received Savings Plans discounts and the appropriate amount to chargeback to them based on their specific usage.

With great pleasure, I am happy to share with you the ten features recently added to the AWS Cloud Financial Management portfolio of services. We hope that these ten new features will help accomplish your daily FinOps tasks more effectively. These new features are like our holiday gifts to you. Enjoy your holiday and these special gifts from us. We look forward to hearing about your experiences with them.