New Cost Optimization Hub centralizes recommended actions to save you money

Today, we are announcing Cost Optimization Hub, a new AWS Billing and Cost Management feature that makes it easy for you to identify, filter, aggregate, and quantify savings for AWS cost optimization recommendations.

With the new Cost Optimization Hub, you can interactively query cost optimization recommendations such as idle resource detection, resource rightsizing, and purchasing options across multiple AWS Regions and AWS accounts in your organizations without any data aggregation and processing. You can find out how much you’ll save if you implement those recommendations and easily compare and prioritize recommendations by savings.

Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, told shareholders, “We’re trying to build customer relationships (and a business) that outlast all of us, and as a result, our AWS sales and support teams are spending much of their time helping customers optimize their AWS spend so they can better weather this uncertain economy” in his 2022 Letter to Shareholders.

Cost Optimization Hub gathers all cost-optimizing recommended actions across AWS Cloud Financial Management (CFM) services, including AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Compute Optimizer, in one place. It incorporates customer-specific pricing and discounts into these recommendations, and it deduplicates findings and savings to give a consolidated view of your cost optimization opportunities.

If you are a FinOps team or infrastructure management team member who wants to understand your cost optimization opportunities in aggregate, such as which AWS accounts or AWS Regions have the most cost optimization opportunities, you should start with Cost Optimization Hub.

You can easily analyze cost optimization opportunities with built-in filters and grouping options. For example, after understanding which AWS account has the most cost optimization opportunities, you can identify the top cost optimization strategies, such as stopping idle resources, rightsizing, and Graviton migration. If you identify which AWS Region has the highest number of rightsizing opportunities, you can get a list of rightsizing recommendations for the Region. It will redirect you to the Compute Optimizer console through deep linking to validate the details, such as the projected CPU utilization if you implement the change.

Getting started with Cost Optimization Hub
To get started, choose Cost Optimization Hub in the left navigation menu of the AWS Billing and Cost Management Console. You can opt in by selecting Enable. There is a 24-hour wait time for Cost Optimization Hub to populate data initially and data will be refreshed daily afterward.

After opt-in, you can see the dashboard of cost optimization recommendations by AWS account, AWS Region, and tag key. If you want to see the list of resources available for optimization, choose View opportunities.

Cost Optimization Hub supports six types of cost-optimizing recommended actions, including:

• Stop – Stop idle or unused resources to save up to 100 percent of the resources’ cost.
• Rightsize – Move to a smaller Amazon EC2 instance type, Amazon EBS volume, AWS Lambda memory size, or AWS Fargate task size
• Upgrade – Move to a later-generation product, such as moving from EBS io1 volume type to io2.
• Graviton migration – Move from EC2 instance types with x86-based processors to EC2 instance types with AWS Graviton-based processors to save costs.
• Purchase Savings Plans – Purchase Compute Savings Plans, EC2 Instance Savings Plans, and Amazon SageMaker Savings Plans
• Purchase Reserved Instances – Purchase Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon ElastiCache, and Amazon Redshift Reserved Instances.

You can see the resource type, top recommended action, and estimated monthly savings. You can also filter the list by AWS account, AWS Region, implementation effort, and tag key as the group-by dimension.

You also can classify each recommendation as “Is resources restart needed” or “Is rollback possible.” If you specify Is resources restart needed=No as the filter, you can only see recommendations that don’t require you to restart your resources, such as EBS volume recommendations. Similarly, If you specify Is rollback possible=Yes as the filter, you can only see recommendations that can be rolled back.

If you select a specific source, for example, right-sizing EC2 instance, you can view details and connect to Amazon EC2 and the AWS Compute Optimizer console. Note that estimated monthly savings is a quick approximation of future savings. The actual savings you will realize are dependent on your future AWS usage patterns.

You can also interactively query through AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) and AWS SDKs.  Here’s a sample query to find the recommendations about deleting and rightsizing resources:

$ aws cost-optimization-hub list-recommendations

The preceding query gives you the following results:

{
   "items":[
      {
         "recommendationId":"MDA2MDI1ODQ1MTA1XzQ5MzNhYzZlLWZmYTUtNGI2ZC04YzBkLTAxYWE3Y2JlNjNlYg==",
         "accountId":"006025845105",
         "region":"Global",
         "resourceId":"006025845105_ComputeSavingsPlans",
         "currentResourceType":"ComputeSavingsPlans",
         "recommendedResourceType":"ComputeSavingsPlans",
         "estimatedMonthlySavings":1506.591472696,
         "estimatedSavingsPercentage":55.46400024,
         "estimatedMonthlyCost":2716.341169146,
         "currencyCode":"USD",
         "implementationEffort":"VeryLow",
         "restartNeeded":false,
         "actionType":"PurchaseSavingsPlans",
         "rollbackPossible":false,
         "recommendedResourceSummary":"$1.628/hour with three years term",
         "lastRefreshTimestamp":"2023-10-23T16:54:13-07:00",
         "recommendationLookbackPeriodInDays":30,
         "source":"CostExplorer"
      },
      {
         "recommendationId":"MDA2MDI1ODQ1MTA1XzhiZTRlNTczLTE0MDctNGIzOS05MmY3LTdmN2EzOTU2Y2ZkYw==",
         "accountId":"006025845105",
         "region":"us-east-1",
         "resourceId":"arn:aws:lambda:us-east-1:006025845105:function:Lambda-recommendation-testing:$LATEST",
         "resourceArn":"arn:aws:lambda:us-east-1:006025845105:function:Lambda-recommendation-testing:$LATEST",
         "currentResourceType":"LambdaFunction",
         "recommendedResourceType":"LambdaFunction",
         "estimatedMonthlySavings":3.1682091425308054e-06,
         "estimatedSavingsPercentage":1.936368871741565,
         "estimatedMonthlyCost":0.00016044778307703665,
         "currencyCode":"USD",
         "implementationEffort":"Low",
         "restartNeeded":false,
         "actionType":"Rightsize",
         "rollbackPossible":true,
         "currentResourceSummary":"128 MB memory",
         "recommendedResourceSummary":"160 MB memory",
         "lastRefreshTimestamp":"2023-10-24T04:07:35.364000-07:00",
         "recommendationLookbackPeriodInDays":14,
         "source":"ComputeOptimizer"
      }
   ]
}

For more information about new Cost Optimization Hub APIs, see the Cost Optimization Hub documentation.

Now available
Cost Optimization Hub is now generally available for all customers. There is no additional charge for this new capability. You can now get started and view cost optimization recommendations across all AWS Regions.

To learn more, see the Cost Optimization Hub page and send feedback to AWS re:Post for Cost Optimization or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Channy