Category: AWS Cost Explorer

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.

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 blog, we’ll explore a straightforward, automated approach to departmental cost allocation using AWS Organizations and AWS Lambda. The solution eliminates manual tracking and gives you clear visibility into departmental spending.

As organizations scale cloud usage, understanding cost variations becomes increasingly complex. Many of you have told us that you sometimes had to spend hours analyzing why costs changed from one month to another. To address this, we’re excited to announce a new cost comparison feature in AWS Cost Explorer that provides automated month-over-month cost change analysis. This feature enables you to quickly identify, understand, and explain variations in your AWS spending. With this new feature, you can now pinpoint the largest cost changes across any cost dimension, such as services, accounts and regions, and drill down into detailed explanations of these changes, including shifts in usage patterns, changes in commitment-based discounts, and applied credits within seconds.

While San Diego’s famous June gloom may have given FinOps attendees overcast skies, the energy inside the FinOps X conference was anything but gloomy. Within just 1.5 days, we engaged in many insightful conversations. As a return, we have brought with us several feature enhancements that will hopefully bring more sunshine to your day-to-day FinOps life.

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 enhanced Cost Anomaly Detection with the ability to provide multiple root causes for cost anomalies. This new capability empowers FinOps professionals and cloud financial managers to quickly identify and resolve the underlying factors driving unexpected cost increases. For FinOps teams striving to optimize cloud spend and maintain financial accountability, this enhancement offers deeper insights and faster resolution times. This post explains how this improvement can help you resolve anomalies more efficiently and answers some frequently asked questions.

We’re excited to announce the release of AWS Cloud Financial Management digital training courses. These are four 1-hour courses that will get you familiarized with key AWS solutions to solve your daily FinOps needs, and equip you with cost optimization techniques for commonly used AWS services.