AWS’ debut to FinOps X: recap and product announcement highlights

Excitement filled the air, as James Greenfield, VP of AWS Commerce Platform, took the stage at 2024 FinOps X in San Diego. This is our first time attending the conference as a member of the FinOps Foundation. James, John Phillips, General Manager of AWS Cloud Financial Management engineering and product management, together with several product leaders and experts, were present at the conference to help customers mature FinOps practices and learn from the brightest minds in the industry. Our product teams have spared no effort in the past few months developing new capabilities, so that we can bring the latest advancements to the stage. Let’s take a moment to recap the product announcements made at FinOps X and how they can help accomplish your FinOps goals.

FinOps is becoming ubiquitous

It is no longer a question that you need FinOps competency, but how fast you can establish the FinOps practice in your organizations and how deeply it pervades in your processes and culture. FinOps is naturally infectious. A few skilled FinOps practitioners can fundamentally influence how your organizations make procurement and architectural decisions. Right decisions, powered by the elasticity of the cloud, can generate immediate and considerable results, and that success feeds on itself. We believe our CFM tooling should be trustworthy and user-friendly, giving you the data and recommendations that you can rely on, while providing flexibility and customization options to factor in your unique business needs.

Trustworthy

Trust in our data and recommendations is paramount. Many of you have told us that you need to access the full spectrum of optimization opportunities for your organizations. To save you time identifying these opportunities, we launched Cost Optimization Hub, aggregating all cost-saving recommendations, ranging from rightsizing to purchase options. These recommendations have quantified cost saving amount that take into consideration the overlapping strategies and provide ways to sort, so you can trust that you’re prioritizing the most impactful optimizations.

Our investment in trust also led us to build user experience that offers transparency and details into how we built our recommendations. The Savings Plans recommendation visual representation is one of the examples that we provide you with specifics into how we generated recommendations for your Savings Plans purchase. In addition to sharing the assessment factors in our recommendations, we also give you the option to fine tune our recommendations by customizing your preferences, so our recommendations are more relevant and accurate for your business. For instance, you can customize the CPU headroom and thresholds, memory utilization, adjust lookback period, and set instance family preferences, so your EC2 rightsizing recommendations are tailor-made for your business. Our investment in trust also includes creating a 7-day window for you to easily return a plan if you decide it’s not the right one for your organization.

Another important way for us to invest in trust is how we work closely with AWS experts who built our services, e.g. compute, database, that you use to create your applications, so our recommendations can be trustworthy. We’ve spent two years working with Amazon RDS team in producing safe and effective optimizations for RDS instances, including rightsizing, idle, CPU architecture, and storage recommendations. We’re happy to announce that this new set of optimization recommendations for RDS instances are now generally available for PostgreSQL, and MySQL database engines. With this, you can identify appropriate Amazon RDS instance types, sizes, and provisioned IOPS settings for existing Amazon RDS resources, and reduce costs for over-provisioned RDS workloads, or increase performance for under-provisioned workloads.

Read more about this launch from this blog “New – RDS Rightsizing Recommendations for MySQL and PostgreSQL in AWS Compute Optimizer”.

Figure 1. Sample screenshot of Amazon RDS Rightsizing recommendations in Cost Optimization Hub

Flexible

Flexibility and ease of use have been our focus. We want to make it easy for you to use our tooling for anything CFM and embrace differences in how you operate and approach FinOps. AWS Billing and Cost Management Console presents key CFM metrics and callouts for your entire organization in one place. You can customize what data you look at on a routine basis with the widget and easily access all the relevant tooling organized by use case, e.g. Cost Analysis, Budgets and Planning. You can access AWS Cost Explorer to visualize and zoom into specific cost and usage dimension. You can also ask and retrieve responses in natural language by using the new cost analysis capability (preview) powered by Amazon Q Developer in Cost Explorer. We offer resource-level granular data and deeper history with less granular data for up to 38 months in Cost Explorer. For those who need even more granular data to allocate cost for your container applications, we offer flexibility to divide costs more finely for AWS managed services like ECS and EKS with Split Cost Allocation Data. To give you the flexibility to stay on top of any potential cost overrun, you can send your Cost Anomaly Detection alert through email, SNS topics (Amazon Chime chatroom, Slack channel), or integrate it with your ITSM workflow. We have recently expedited the time to send anomaly alert by 30%, so you can be notified with root cause analysis and address any unexpected cost sooner.

Our investment in flexibility is also reflected in how we continue to serve those who don’t use our console-based tools, due to access permission or personal preference. AWS Billing and Cost Management Data Exports gives you the flexibility to customize your own exports with only the data and granularity that make sense to your use case, removing unnecessary and sensitive information. You can share the exports with stakeholders who don’t have access to our console, or embed these data into your BI solutions. We already made the Cost and Usage Report (CUR) 2.0 and legacy CUR available in Data Exports. Today, we’re excited to announce the general availability of Data Exports for Cost Optimization Hub. You can now deliver consolidated cost optimization recommendations in CSV or parquet format to Amazon S3 on a recurring basis with data filters and savings deduplication applied.

Read more about this launch in this blog “Generate your cost optimization reports with Data Exports for Cost Optimization Hub“.

Figure 2. Sample screenshot of Data Exports for Cost Optimization Hub

Standardized

We recognize that some of you have hybrid workloads run in multiple environments. In order to fully understand the value of your investments, you need to transform billing and usage data across multiple sources (e.g. cloud, SaaS providers, internal). It takes time to normalize cost and usage data across these sources and can distract you from other high impact initiatives. The goal of the FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification) project, supported by the FinOps Foundation, is to remove such complexity by reaching alignment on areas, such as cost treatment, consistency of value and schema. As part of the FOCUS steering committee, we have been contributing to the specifications, ensuring they can help make meaningful improvements for how we offer cloud financial management solutions to our customers.

Today, we are excited to announce that AWS Billing and Cost Management now provides Data Exports for FOCUS v1.0. You can create exports of your AWS cost and usage data with the FOCUS 1.0 schema. The feature is currently in preview, and we’re working towards the general availability (GA) launch very soon.

“We are excited to be part of an effort to make it easier for customers to use cloud financial data to get a better understanding of their AWS investments. Contributing to the FOCUS specification is an important part of our broader efforts to improve our cloud financial management offerings and help customers get the most out of their AWS investments.”  — James Greenfield, Vice President, Commerce Platform at AWS

Read more about this feature from this blog “Announcing Data Exports for FOCUS 1.0 (Preview) in AWS Billing and Cost Management“.

Figure 3. Sample screenshot of Data Exports for FOCUS 1.0

Looking ahead

We appreciate the partnership with the FinOps Foundation and its members. We have hundreds of builders, product managers, and field specialists serving you and helping you to mature your FinOps practices. We look forward to collaborating with industry leaders and engaging with you in driving evolution towards more efficient cloud financial management practices.