Category: Best Practices

Amazon EC2 and SageMaker AI are two of the foundational AWS services for Generative AI. Amazon EC2 provides the scalable computing power needed for training and inference, while SageMaker AI offers built-in tools for model development, deployment, and optimization. Cost optimization is crucial since Generative AI workloads require high-performance accelerators (GPU, Trainium, or Inferentia) and extensive processing, which can become expensive without efficient resource management. By leveraging the below cost optimization strategies, you can reduce costs while maintaining performance and scalability.

If you or your organizations are in the midst of exploring generative AI technologies, it’s important for you to be aware of the investment that comes with these advanced applications. While you are aiming at the expected return on your generative AI investment, such as, operational efficiency, increased productivity, or improved customer satisfaction, you should also have a good understanding of levers you can use to drive cost savings and enhanced efficiency. To guide you through this exciting journey, we will publish a series of blog posts filled with practical tips to help AI practitioners and FinOps leaders understand how to optimize the costs associated with your generative AI adoption with AWS.

In this article, we will show you how to define a chargeback mechanism that allocates Savings Plans purchased in the management account, linked accounts or both to recipient accounts of Savings Plan discounts. You can identify accounts that received Savings Plans discounts and the appropriate amount to chargeback to them based on their specific usage.

We’re excited to announce the release of AWS Cloud Financial Management digital training courses. These are four 1-hour courses that will get you familiarized with key AWS solutions to solve your daily FinOps needs, and equip you with cost optimization techniques for commonly used AWS services.

We want to show you the benefits of CUR 2.0 and provide steps on how to migrate to CUR 2.0, so you don’t lose out! CUR 2.0 builds upon the Legacy CUR, while offering several key improvements for your cost tracking. Both 2.0 and Legacy allow you to analyze AWS costs in greater detail and accuracy, especially by including Resource IDs and hourly time granularity.

This blog shows how you can automatically propagate account-level tags to AWS resources created by AWS Service Catalog. Service Catalog allows sharing of portfolios across AWS accounts and provides a TagOption library to manage tags on provisioned AWS resources. Resource tagging varies by account, so it is not part of the portfolio product configurations. We designed the solution to reduce the burden on users to a minimum, while also adopting cloud best practices such as infrastructure automation.

In part one of this blog series, we shared instructions on how you can integrate AWS Cost Anomaly Detection (CAD) notification with Atlassian Jira Service Management (read blog). In part two of the blog series, we will shed light on the integration of CAD with ServiceNow IT Service Management. ServiceNow IT Service Management offers a widely […]

Executive sponsors play a pivotal role in ensuring the success and effectiveness of a FinOps practice. In this blog, we outline a framework for your organization to gain executive sponsorship.

Given cloud invoice timing and the corporate closing calendar, variances between the AWS CUR and the GL are common for many companies. Our recommendation is to document your financial closing process, and educate leadership on any identified variance drivers. Calculating the variance percentage between the finalized AWS CUR and your GL entry to use as a talking point can also enhance understanding of the financial process.

When FinOps Practitioners share recommendations for cost optimization, they can often be met with a “No”, a “I can’t right now”, or “It’s not my priority” from a Developers (Devs). According to the FinOps Foundation’s “State of FinOps 2023” report, the number one pain point was getting engineers to take action. But, I am here to say, “it’s not the Devs fault!” We spoke with customers who have overcome this roadblock and want to share the lessons learned with you! This blog will walk through 10 ways you can work with your engineers to establish a FinOps culture at your organization.