New training helps build skills for AWS cost management

In a 451 Research survey, 80 percent of respondents acknowledged having a poor understanding of financial management as it relates to cloud costs. These same respondents acknowledged this lack of understanding resulted in a negative impact on their business, including deceleration of cloud adoption, slower innovation, decreased quality of service, underutilized resources, and increased costs.

To address this customer need, AWS Training and Certification today launched AWS Cloud Financial Management for Builders. This three-day, intermediate course is for cloud and solution architects, developers, DevOps, system administrators, and technologists interested in learning to design cost-optimized architectures. To ensure financial success in the journey to the cloud, builders need to develop the skills to leverage the right tools, best practices, and services that can help them efficiently manage the cloud and optimize their cost.

Why do you need to build skills for cloud financial management?

Historically, computing costs were tied to a quarterly or yearly hardware procurement investment, with a single point of ownership for cost management. With cloud technology, you can now initialize resources and services at any time, and pay only for what you use.

Technology teams are no longer just builders, but operators and owners of their products, responsible for most of the activities historically associated with finance and operations teams, including procurement and deployment. As such, they need the knowledge about AWS services, architecture, deployment, operations, and cost optimization. Cloud financial management expertise enables builders to have a direct impact on efficiency and productivity of their organizations and achieve expected business outcomes. This is a major transformation for organizations that are used to working in traditional models.

Cloud Financial Management Framework

Cloud Financial Management is defined a set of activities that enables organizations to manage, optimize, and estimate costs as they grow their usage of AWS. A disciplined approach of Cloud Financial Management enables customers to find the right balance between agility and control, while improving unit economics and cost efficiencies. The Cloud Financial Management Framework includes:

• Measurement and accountability: Establish cost and visibility to ensure transparency into and accountability for spend
• Cost Optimization: Ensure your organization pays only for the resources it needs
• Planning and Forecasting: Better understand costs associated with current and future cloud workloads
• Cloud Financial Operations: Establish executive sponsorship to invest in people, governance, and tools for cost management

AWS Cloud Financial Management for Builders

The new AWS Cloud Financial Management for Builders classroom course helps learners develop the expertise to monitor AWS services costs and usage, optimize costs, and implement governance standards, all while building modern, scalable applications to meet their needs.

The course covers AWS services and their cost impacts, purpose-built tools, cost inflection points, costs associated with current and future cloud workloads, and best practices for architecting for cost optimization. Upon completion of this course, participants will be able to monitor and control cloud spend and usage, estimate for future costs, and run cost efficient cloud environments and workloads.

An early participant in AWS Cloud Financial Management for Builders, Lance Broderick, director of Business Integration at NU Skin, said this about the course:

“I enrolled in this course to better understand AWS cost drivers to help run, monitor, and forecast cloud spend more effectively. This course gave me those insights and more, giving me greater confidence in recommending configurations to my colleagues that will reduce cost while still maintaining optimal performance and reliability for our applications. The most helpful portion for me were the hands-on labs that walked us through examples, as well as the quick access to instructors who have been building with AWS for years.”

Enroll today

You can find a class or request private onsite training for your team. Additionally, explore the AWS Cost Management Ramp-Up Guide, featuring the AWS Cloud Financial Management Framework, as well as various resources, training, whitepapers, and videos to support learners building cloud cost management skills.