AWS Cloud Financial Management 2023 Q1 recap

The uncertainty of the world economy has once again emphasized the importance of resource efficiency. So, until ChatGPT replaces me with automated blog writing, I will continue to write about all the new and exciting updates from AWS Cloud Financial Management (CFM).

AWS Cost Anomaly Detection (CAD) is now auto-configured for new AWS Cost Explorer users – Maybe you’ve heard of CAD but haven’t had the chance to enable the service and use its advanced machine learning technology to improve your cloud cost control. AWS has made the onboarding experience of CAD much easier for all new Cost Explorer users by auto configuring your first CAD monitor with the daily alert summary email. Learn more about this new feature and how you can modify it based on your cost control needs.

Allow listing tool for testing new Billing, Cost Management, and Account console pages –While being cost aware should be everyone’s job, access to billing and cost-related information should be provided on an as-needed basis to support productivity, accountability, and ownership. Now you can grant and align user access to newly launched, service-specific IAM actions (e.g., Cost Explorer, Budgets, billing preferences). With these new permissions, you now have a single set of IAM actions that govern access to both console and programmatic interfaces. Learn more about how you can test, start using, or migrating to these new IAM actions by July 6, 2023.

Deprecation of the Simple Monthly Calculator – AWS is consolidating the experience for you to explore the pricing of AWS services and estimate the cost of your architectural needs in one place: AWS Pricing Calculator. The Simple Monthly Calculator was deprecated on March 31, 2023. If you previously created cost estimates in the Simple Monthly Calculator, AWS launched a conversion feature so you can generate a new AWS Pricing Calculator URL and not lose your saved estimates. The conversion feature is available until the end of this year (December 31, 2023).

AWS Billing Conductor (ABC) announces new SKU pricing rules and pricing update – AWS Billing Conductor is a chargeback solution that simplifies the process to configure pro-forma bills for your internal business units and/or external end customers. With the launch of SKU pricing rules, now you can create a pricing rule unique to an AWS resource (e.g., CloudWatch Custom Metrics “MetricMonitorUsage”), and be more granular when you apply markups and discounts. ABC has also updated its pricing model to a tiered, account-based structure, effective June 1, 2023. As a payer account, the total number of accounts assigned to any ABC billing groups will be billed at $8.25 per account for the first 500 accounts, $6.75 for the next 1,500 accounts, and $5.25 per account beyond that. To give existing ABC customers time to experiment with this new pricing model, ABC will be free of charge for 2 months (April and May, 2023). For new ABC customers, there will be a free 2-month trial. Learn more about this new pricing model..

AWS Compute Optimizer (ACO) updates requirement for historical data and newly added EBS volume types – Compute Optimizer offers resource optimization for several services: Amazon EC2 instance types, Amazon EBS volumes, Amazon ECS services on AWS Fargate, and AWS Lambda functions. Recommendations are provided based on your historical usage. Previously, the EC2 instance type recommendation required 30 consecutive hours of utilization data. Now, as long as there is a cumulative 30 hours of utilization data in the past 14 days, or 93 days (for enhanced infrastructure metrics), ACO will generate rightsizing recommendations for supported EC2 instance types. Meanwhile, ACO recently added two new volume types, Hard Disk Drive (HDD) and io2 Block Express. It will identify opportunities such as upsizing the Throughput-Optimized HDD (st1) and Cold HDD (sc1) volumes, switching from st1 volumes to General Purpose (gp3) volumes for improved IOPS or throughput. For Provisioned IOPS (io1/io2), EBS volumes that are attached to io2-Block Express-enabled EC2 instances, Compute Optimizer can recommend upsizing and provisioning higher IOPS, fully utilizing the benefits of io2 Block Express.

Conclusions

The AWS CFM team will continue to focus on improving our solution capabilities to help make 2023 the Year of Efficiency. Learn more about how you can improve efficiency and get the most out of your cloud spend, and stay tuned for more product launches to help you plan, manage, and control your cloud costs.