AWS Cloud Financial Management 2022 Q1 recap

As the cliché on social media goes these days, the year “2022” is pronounced as “2020 too”, and so much more.  There has been a lot going on near and far that demand mind space from us.  As much as we can delegate work to professionals, we’ll be able to spend our limited energy on meaningful things. Let’s take a look at what AWS Cloud Financial Management team delivered in Q1 and see how these new capabilities can help solve your immediate and long-term financial needs.

Track, report, and allocate your AWS usage

Detailed cost and billing information are now available for Amazon RDS Backups and General Purpose, Provisioned IOPS, and Magnetic storage that are created in Amazon RDS for MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server (launched 3/22). You can use AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Cost & Usage report to view the itemized data and the breakdown of costs.

Like many others, your organization may’ve set the carbon emission target to assess and report your business’ environmental impact.  The new Customer Carbon Footprint Tool (launched 3/1) provides visibility into the carbon emissions incurred by your AWS usage, estimated reduction in carbon emissions by leveraging AWS versus operating your own IT infrastructure, and forecasted emission trends as AWS progresses towards powering operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025.  Read the documentation and blog for more details.

Often the billing relationship in your organization or between you and your end customers don’t coincide with the hierarchical account set up in AWS billing.  Additionally, you want to adjust the pricing, add mark-up, or share credits and costs, based on your organizational cost allocation logic, or the negotiated terms for your end customers.  With AWS Billing Conductor (launched 3/26), you can structure accounts into mutually exclusive billing groups, apply pricing adjustment, savings, and overhead costs at your discretion. The pro forma reporting is available in the AWS billing console and AWS Cost & Usage report.  Read the how-to guide and documentation to start today.

Dynamically plan your AWS spend

AWS Budgets allows you to set custom budgets to track your cost and usage, so you can stay informed as you plan and manage your AWS usage. You can now select “Auto-adjusting” (launched 2/17), in addition to “fixed” and “planned”, as your budgeting method.  This allows AWS to set the budget threshold for you based on your historical usage pattern of a specified time range, e.g. last month, 6-month.  Read “budget methods” for more details.

Centrally govern your billing, cost, and payment

As a frequent user of AWS Billing console, you must have noticed the new billing dashboard view (launched 2/10).  In the new experience, you can quickly spot your current and forecasted monthly charge, the growth trend, and understand cost drivers (service, account) and their trailing 3- and 6-months’ trend. You can access Cost Management, Cost Anomaly Detection, and AWS Organizations from the quick links at the bottom of the page.  Read this documentation “Using the AWS Billing console dashboard”.

AWS Cost Anomaly Detection monitors your spend and alerts you when anomalous spend is detected with AWS’ root cause analysis. You can dive deeper with your own analysis and take timely actions to address any potential cost overruns.  AWS sends you individual alert, or daily/weekly alert summary via Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) or emails.  Now, through the integration with AWS Chatbot (launched 3/14), you can receive individual alerts in the Slack channel or Amazon Chime room of your choice.  Read this “how-to guide” to set up your alert subscription using AWS Chatbot.

AWS Cost Anomaly Detection now supports resource and tag-based access controls.  You can specify AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies for monitors and alert subscriptions based on their Amazon Resource Names (ARNs) and tags. Read user guide “access control and examples for Cost Anomaly Detection” for more details.  Similarly, you can now define AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies to specify permissions for AWS Cost Categories based on ARNs and tags. Learn more from this user guide: resource and tag based access control for Cost Categories.

When receiving multiple invoices from different AWS service providers (also known as “seller of record”), you can now create Payment Profiles (launched 2/28) to customize your AWS payment preferences, ensuring there is a valid payment method for auto bill payment for each invoice. Read “managing your payment profiles” for details. For our customers in China, you can now activate Chinese Yuan as your Payment Methods with your China UnionPay credit card and Bank Redirect (launched 2/28).

Conclusions:

We hope you find these services and features useful.  Please continue to share your feedback on our products. Look for the “feedback” option at the bottom of the screen in the AWS console, or top of the screen in the AWS Documentation site.  You can also share your thoughts on our products to account managers and product managers, depending on your preferences.

If you’d like to stay up to date with AWS CFM solutions and engage in the CFM community, you can tune into our CFM talks (April 12: “Simplify Your Billing Process with AWS”) and join our upcoming peer connect events to exchange experiences with fellow customers (April 20: “Solving cost management complexity at scale – as easy as ABC”).