Category: Announcements

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.

We’re excited to announce granular cost visibility for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) in the AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR), enabling you to analyze, optimize, and chargeback cost and usage for your Kubernetes applications. With AWS Split Cost Allocation Data for Amazon EKS, customers can now allocate application costs to individual business units […]

AWS Cloud Financial Management Technical Implementation Playbooks (CFM TIPs) – The complete playbook for implementing and improving effective Cloud Financial Management capabilities in your organization. Utilizing the Cloud Financial Management framework and the Cost Optimization pillar in the AWS Well-Architected Framework, we have built an accessible step-by-step playbook to help you to implement a specific set of capabilities in your organization. This results in mechanisms that ensure ongoing, self-sufficient cost optimization and governance.

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.

We have extended the history and improved the granularity of data available in AWS Cost Explorer. Cost Explorer by default now supports 14 months of cost and usage data at daily granularity. In addition, customers have the option to enable up to 38 months of history at a monthly granularity, and they have the option to enable 14 days of resource level data for any AWS service at daily granularity. Each of these features is offered for free.

Today, AWS launched a unified Billing and Cost Management console to help you manage your AWS cloud finances more easily and efficiently. The unified console includes a new home page with insights and recommendations to help you make faster, better-informed decisions, more intuitive navigation to streamline your workflows, and improved resources to help you learn and implement Cloud Financial Management best practices. This post explains how you can use the unified Billing and Cost Management console to manage your AWS cloud finances and answers frequently asked questions.

Today, we announced the general availability of Data Exports, a new AWS Billing and Cost Management feature that enables you to create exports of your billing and cost management data using SQL column selections and row filters. As part of AWS Data Exports, you can now also deploy a Cost and Usage Dashboard powered by Amazon QuickSight directly from the AWS Billing and Cost Management console. The Cost and Usage Dashboard uses a summary view of the AWS Cost and Usage Report 2.0 (CUR 2.0) and provides pre-built visuals to facilitate interactive analysis and sharing of cost insights with a broader stakeholder group who may not have access to AWS console.