AWS Cloud Financial Management

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.

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.

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.

At AWS re:Invent 2023, there were over 40 FinOps-related announcements. However, some announcements may not even seem FinOps related at first glance. In this blog, we are going to look at AWS re:Invent announcements that are not specifically targeted at cost optimization but can help you optimize. The announcements highlighted in this blog may not appear as ways to save money initially, but they will have a big impact on your spend if you use them to their full potential.

AWS Compute Optimizer is a powerful tool that offers recommendations to optimize your Amazon EC2 instances, helping you identify suitable instance types, reduce underutilized resources, and enhance performance. In this blog post, we will explore AWS Compute Optimizer and demonstrate how to automatically apply its recommendations, resulting in significant cost savings and improved resource efficiency.

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.

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.