AWS Cloud Financial Management

Category: Best Practices

Aligning Cloud Costs with the General Ledger for Accurate Financial Analysis

Aligning Cloud Costs with the General Ledger for Accurate Financial Analysis

Given cloud invoice timing and the corporate closing calendar, variances between the AWS CUR and the GL are common for many companies. Our recommendation is to document your financial closing process, and educate leadership on any identified variance drivers. Calculating the variance percentage between the finalized AWS CUR and your GL entry to use as a talking point can also enhance understanding of the financial process.

10 ways to work with Devs

10 Ways to work WITH Developers to take action with FinOps/Cost Optimization

When FinOps Practitioners share recommendations for cost optimization, they can often be met with a “No”, a “I can’t right now”, or “It’s not my priority” from a Developers (Devs). According to the FinOps Foundation’s “State of FinOps 2023” report, the number one pain point was getting engineers to take action. But, I am here to say, “it’s not the Devs fault!” We spoke with customers who have overcome this roadblock and want to share the lessons learned with you! This blog will walk through 10 ways you can work with your engineers to establish a FinOps culture at your organization.

Graviton 2 and GP3 with Amazon OpenSearch Service

Better Together – Graviton 2 and GP3 with Amazon OpenSearch Service

There are many benefits to running your Amazon OpenSearch Service workloads on Graviton2 based instances coupled with the gp3 EBS volume type. If you’re currently maintaining an Amazon OpenSearch Service workload, these changes are easy to make and can provide ~10% in savings with minimal effort.

feature_how-to_optimize for others

Optimize and save on “other” services

When it comes to cost optimization, you often focus on the top spenders, but the cost of the services that typically fall under the “Others” category can be just as high as the top cost drivers. It’s worth looking into the sources of these costs and identifying opportunities for cost and performance optimization. In this blog, I’ll use a few examples to demonstrate how you can dive deeper and understand the cost elements of these “other” services and what you can do to optimize the spend.

feature_how-to_optimize x86

Optimize your x86-based Amazon EC2 Workloads

This post will show how you can optimize your x86 Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute workloads with no architectural changes. We will focus on improving price-to-performance without introducing engineering overhead, large planning cycles and significant time investment. The optimizations mentioned today require no application engineering and can be done quickly. The focal point of this post is showing the benefits of running your x86 EC2 workloads on AMD based EC2 instances to achieve at least 10% cost savings.

Understand your AWS bill with the right cost allocation strategy

Effective cost tracking and allocation is crucial to operating in the cloud. With the right strategies and AWS tools, you can access and provide cost and usage data that aligns with your business objectives, helping you manage and optimize your cloud spend with increased understanding and accountability across your AWS bill. Learn about and see cost allocation strategies in action to help you understand your AWS bill.