Category: AWS Cost and Usage Report

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.

Today AWS announced the general availability release of Data Exports for FOCUS 1.0. You can now create exports of your AWS cost and usage data with the FOCUS 1.0 schema with significant specification conformance improvements compared to the public preview released in June 2024. FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Standard), supported by the FinOps Foundation, is an open-source cloud cost and usage specification that provides standardization to normalize cost and usage data and simplify cloud financial management across multiple sources. With Data Exports for FOCUS 1.0, you can easily aggregate, query, and analyze cost and usage data from various sources.

We want to show you the benefits of CUR 2.0 and provide steps on how to migrate to CUR 2.0, so you don’t lose out! CUR 2.0 builds upon the Legacy CUR, while offering several key improvements for your cost tracking. Both 2.0 and Legacy allow you to analyze AWS costs in greater detail and accuracy, especially by including Resource IDs and hourly time granularity.

Our product teams have spared no effort in the past few months developing new capabilities, so that we can bring the latest advancements to FinOps X. Let’s take a moment to recap the product announcements made at FinOps X and how they can help accomplish your FinOps goals.

Starting today, you can create exports of your AWS cost and usage data with the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) 1.0 schema as a preview feature. For those of you who aren’t yet familiar with the FOCUS standard, FOCUS is a new open-source cloud billing data specification that provides consistency and standardization to simplify cloud cost reporting and analysis across multiple sources. With Data Exports for FOCUS 1.0 (preview), you can configure recurring delivery of your AWS cost and usage data with the FOCUS 1.0 schema to your designated Amazon S3 bucket, and use these exports for your desired FinOps activities, such as cost reporting and allocation.