Author: Bowen Wang

Our product teams have spared no effort in the past few months developing new capabilities, so that we can bring the latest advancements to FinOps X. Let’s take a moment to recap the product announcements made at FinOps X and how they can help accomplish your FinOps goals.

Starting today, you can create exports of your AWS cost and usage data with the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) 1.0 schema as a preview feature. For those of you who aren’t yet familiar with the FOCUS standard, FOCUS is a new open-source cloud billing data specification that provides consistency and standardization to simplify cloud cost reporting and analysis across multiple sources. With Data Exports for FOCUS 1.0 (preview), you can configure recurring delivery of your AWS cost and usage data with the FOCUS 1.0 schema to your designated Amazon S3 bucket, and use these exports for your desired FinOps activities, such as cost reporting and allocation.

We’re excited to announce that starting today AWS Billing and Cost Management provides Data Exports for Cost Optimization Hub. With Data Exports for Cost Optimization Hub, you can deliver consolidated cost optimization recommendations in CSV or parquet format to Amazon S3 on a recurring basis. You can define what data you want to include in the export using basic SQL query or column/row filters in the console. You can share exports with stakeholders, load them into your BI dashboards, or add to your Cloud Financial Management data lake.

Starting today, AWS Compute Optimizer delivers new recommendations for Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) MySQL and PostgreSQL databases. These recommendations help you detect idle RDS instances and identify the optimal instance types and provisioned IOPS settings for your existing RDS DB instances, so you can reduce costs for idle and over-provisioned RDS DB instances or increase the performance of under-provisioned workloads.

If you’re scratching your head and trying to catch up with all the re:Invent launch announcements from the AWS Cloud Financial Management team, let me walk you through how your FinOps experience may be improved for better with the latest capabilities that were just released last week at AWS re:Invent 2023. I’ve also included recordings of these launch announcements, so you can watch these at your own pace.

Thanks to our product and engineering teams’ tireless efforts in building new capabilities for AWS Cloud Financial Management portfolio, I get to talk about these amazing features. Let’s take a look at what we’ve made available for you in the last quarter.

If you’re planning to attend the AWS re:Invent 2023 and wondering what Cloud Financial Management sessions and activities you should participate, look no further! In this blog post, we’ll take a sneak peek into these programs. Hope it can help you navigate re:Invent like a true CFM pro and learn and meet with like-minded FinOps professionals.

To provide the ability for end users of our resellers and large organizations to understand and analyze cost at their negotiated rates, we enabled proforma cost support in Cost Explorer.

In case you missed the launch announcement from AWS Cloud Financial Management solution category in Q2, this blog presents you a quick summary.

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.