Category: AWS Cost Explorer

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.

CrowdStrike, a leader in cloud-delivered endpoint and workload protection, provides comprehensive security solutions to organizations worldwide. CrowdStrike’s implementation of a dedicated FinOps admin account demonstrates that organizations can achieve efficient cost management while limiting management/payer account access. Their approach provides a clear framework that other organizations can adapt for their own environments, particularly those operating at scale where both cost management complexity and security requirements are high.

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.

We’re excited to announce enhanced forecasting capabilities in AWS Cost Explorer, now providing up to 18 months of future cost projections with improved accuracy and AI-powered explanations (preview). This extended forecast horizon addresses the need for long-term financial planning that aligns with enterprise fiscal cycles, while providing transparency into the drivers behind your cost forecasts.

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.

The decision between Containers and Serverless Functions – or the implementation of both – should be driven by a thorough understanding of workload characteristics, cost implications, and operational requirements. As FinOps professionals, you should work closely with development and operations teams to analyze usage patterns, model costs under different scenarios, and consider factors like development velocity, operational overhead, and long-term maintainability. By leveraging the strengths of both Containers and Serverless technologies, you can build flexible, cost-effective cloud architectures that adapt to changing business needs while optimizing resource utilization and expenditure.

A cloud vendor’s Cloud Financial Management (CFM) capabilities are crucial for your success in the cloud. Whether you’re planning future investments, optimizing current spending, or allocating costs across your organization, having the right CFM tools makes all the difference. AWS is proud to be recognized with the 1st place in forecasting and estimation use case, and top 3 in driving cost efficiency use case and promotion accountability use case in the latest 2025 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Cloud Financial Management Tools research.

Are you ready to maximize your Cloud Financial Management (CFM) learning and networking time at re:Invent 2025? As usual, I’ve put together this comprehensive guide to help you plan your schedule and make the most of the CFM sessions available this year. This year’s catalog features an exciting mix of content across different formats: from breakout, chalk talks, workshops, builder’s sessions, to code talks.