Category: Billing & Account Management

If you manage invoices for dozens or hundreds of AWS payer accounts, you face repetitive console logins, individual file downloads, and manual data entry into your financial systems. Each billing cycle requires hours of administrative work as you navigate to the Console, download PDFs one by one, and organize files for compliance and record-keeping. This manual approach introduces […]

In this blog post, we cover how to manage the complete AWS Savings Plans lifecycle using the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) and SDK. AWS Savings Plans are a flexible pricing model that offers lower prices compared to On-Demand pricing, in exchange for a specific usage commitment (measured in $/hour) for a one or three […]

Your AWS bill reveals more than spend patterns; it can identify security issues. The AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) contains detailed usage data across your AWS Organization, enabling you to find cost optimization opportunities, allocate costs, and uncover potential security risks. In this post you’ll learn how you can use the AWS CUR to identify potential security issues in your environment. We share examples of potential risks, and the markers in the CUR […]

Imagine it’s Monday morning and your CFO, engineering directors, and finance team all receive a comprehensive AWS cost report in their inbox, without anyone on your FinOps team lifting a finger. The report shows last week’s spending trends, Savings Plans utilization, and cost breakdowns by service, all formatted professionally and ready for review during the […]

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, we are excited to announce new capabilities within AWS Billing and Cost Management that enable you to create custom billing views containing cost and usage data from multiple organizations. You can now share custom billing views with AWS accounts outside your organization and combine multiple custom billing views to create consolidated multi-source views. These features allow you to access cost management data across multiple organizations through AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Budgets from a single AWS account.

Savings Plans offer a flexible pricing model that provides you up to 72% savings on your AWS compute workload compared to on-demand prices. When your AWS footprint grows through organic expansion, regional scaling, mergers, acquisitions, or setting up AWS Organizations to align with your business requirements, understanding how the recommendations are made at payer and linked account levels helps you manage Savings Plans at scale. If you are managing a multi-account AWS Organization, you might have noticed that Savings Plan recommendations differ between your payer account (also known as management account) and linked account (also known as member account).

Today, we’re excited to announce the general availability of the authenticated AWS Pricing Calculator in the AWS Billing and Cost Management Console. The new capability improves the accuracy of cost estimates for new workloads or modifications to your existing AWS usage by incorporating eligible discounts and commitment savings. You can now easily model cost changes for things such as migrating workloads between regions, modifying existing or planning new workloads, and planning for commitment purchases.

In this blog post, we discuss how Amazon used AWS Billing Conductor to build a custom solution, enabling them to view their AWS cost at internal rates in AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR).

Today, we are excited to announce custom billing views, a new feature within AWS Billing and Cost Management that allows you to grant member accounts in your organization access to cost and usage view spanning multiple member accounts. Many of you have teams that own multiple AWS accounts and told us that you want to have a single view of cost data for each team. At the same time, you want to minimize the number of people who have access to the management account that owns the organization-level cost data. With the newly launched custom billing views, you can now make cost and usage data spanning multiple member accounts available to a designated member account in your organization. Let’s dive into how you can set this up.