The Keys to AWS Optimization Season 6 highlights

That’s a wrap on Season 6 of the AWS cost Twitch show, ‘The Keys to AWS Optimization”. Hosts Steph Gooch (Senior Optimization Solutions Architect, AWS), Savanna Jensen (Senior FinOps Success Manager, AWS), and John Masci (Principal Optimization Solutions Architect, AWS) share stories, concepts, and solutions to help you unlock your spend at AWS. Each week they’re joined by a special guest to give you actionable insights and recommendations that you apply to your business.

In case you missed it or are looking to explore a new cost optimization resource, we’re sharing the top 3 episodes of Season 6.

Spend Forecasting | S6 E4

In this first video, we look at why forecasting is important and the tools you can use to plan for your future cloud spend. Jeff Duresky (Senior FinOps Commercial Architect, AWS) comes from a corporate finance and cloud finance background to provide a finance/PO point of view. We talk about forecasting your workloads, adding these to your General Ledger and look at how to explain variances to those forecasts. To start with, we look at the AWS Pricing Calculator to drive the conversation between tech and finance by providing a base set of data. Next, when looking at variance, Jeff talks about the importance of not just reviewing spend changes but asking why this has happened. Finally, we talk common cost language and best practices for sharing this with your teams. If you are struggling to make a connection between tech and finance, this episode can help.

Automating FinOps Usage | S6 E2

Tired of manually actioning cost optimization recommendations? In this episode, Bindu Sharmas (Senior Manager of FinOps, Guidewire Software) and I look into automated methods for removing idle resources . She joins the show to give a gold standard of FinOps automation. We talk through her solution for automation, her lessons learned and how she was able to get traction with developers. Her company’s goal was to take away manual reporting and move to an automated process to create a report that could be acted on in real time. They made sure to measure not only cost optimization savings but also the work effort involved. This enable developers to prioritize effectively and take action accordingly.

Row Level Security for CID | S6 E5

We often talk about how essential it is to understand, harness, and visualize your cost and usage data to optimize the value you can achieve in the cloud. There’s a caveat, though. In some cases, users can be hindered with access to all available cost data for an entire organization. Whereas, what developers really want is an easy access to the data they actually care about. Because of this, they have to spend time configuring their own filtering rules to find the data they need. In this episode with Veaceslav Mindru (Senior Technical Account Manager, AWS), we look at Row Level Security (RLS) in Amazon QuickSight, and how you can restrict the data a user can see to a subset of the business most relevant to them.

Stay tuned and informed

All of Season 6 is available here (link to the playlist), and we have started Season 7! So subscribe to the YouTube channel to see all our videos- new and old, and keep up with the Keys to AWS Optimization. The show airs 3:30pm BT, 10:30am ET, 7:30am PT on Twitch.

Never want to miss an episode? Register here for a meeting invite and email costoptimization@amazon.com to give feedback suggestions.