AWS Cloud Financial Management

As organizations scale their cloud footprint, they also need a mechanism to effectively scale their cost optimization practice at the same time, which is where FinOps Experience-Based Acceleration (EBA) workshop come in to scale the process efficiently. Cost visibility tools identify savings, however many organizations struggle to turn those insights into action across their hundreds of teams and thousands of applications. This post discusses the best-practices that a major North American financial institution took to run a FinOps EBA to scale their cloud cost optimization and establish a cost-aware culture across their organization; this resulted in generating over $1.4M USD in annual recurring savings for them.

When you use AWS Billing Conductor (ABC) to produce pro forma billing, you have full control over how costs are presented to your member accounts. By default, commitments purchased at the management account level are managed separately from ABC billing groups. Pro forma bills for your member accounts reflect on-demand equivalent costs. The good news is that ABC provides the flexibility to customize your pro forma billing to reflect these savings, which sometimes requires additional configuration beyond the default setup. In this post, we walk you through an automated pipeline that calculates the exact dollar savings each member account received from management-held RIs and SPs and injects those savings as proportional credit adjustments into ABC. This gives you an accurate, auditable chargeback number for every account, every month.

Past-due balances are easy to see and hard to explain. The AWS Management Console shows the amount, but not the failed payment or the reason for decline. Previously, finding the reason required opening a support case. With payment capabilities in Amazon Q, now available in the AWS Management Console, you can investigate a past-due balance, understand why a payment failed, and take the corrective action in a single conversation. If you work in accounts payable or FinOps, you can eliminate most of the manual reconciliation a past-due notice normally triggers.

AWS introduced the FinOps Agent (currently in public preview) at FinOps X 2026. FinOps automation is still relatively new, and given the sensitivity around cloud and AI cost management, it’s understandable if you’re hesitant to go all-in on autonomous FinOps right away. In this post, we’ll share our mental model for FinOps automation, the four tiers of automation you can follow, and the four built-in trust levers you can rely on to stay in control as automation scales.

In this post, you’ll learn how to build a programmatic solution that automatically limits and revokes developer access when AWS Budgets thresholds are exceeded. You’ll create a “circuit breaker” that automatically prevents further resource creation while maintaining a clear audit trail. AWS Budgets natively supports Budgets Actions such as applying SCPs or stopping EC2 instances. This guidance shows how you can manage IAM Identity Center permission set assignments

AWS Data Exports lets you select which columns to include in your AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR 2.0) export. But filtering down rows to specific accounts or services still required post-processing. Whether you need to share cost data with a partner, isolate a program’s spend, or meet an audit scope, teams often build downstream pipelines with AWS Lambda, AWS Glue, or Amazon Athena. AWS Data Exports supports SQL-based row filtering at the source. Each destination receives a pre-filtered dataset including only the rows that match your criteria with no post-processing step required. In this post, you’ll learn how to filter CUR 2.0 data at the source using AWS Data Exports SQL query capabilities, so you get the data you need.

We’re excited to announce Managed Dashboards in AWS Billing and Cost Management (BCM). Starting today, a collection of preconfigured, read-only dashboards appear automatically in your BCM Dashboards list. They are populated with your account data and ready to deliver actionable cost insights the moment you open them. No widget selection, no configuration, no layout decisions. You get five […]

If every dollar invested in artificial intelligence (AI) generated a two-dollar return, rising costs would signal positive ROI rather than inefficiency. However, establishing a relationship between AI spend and business value can be complex, leaving you without clear metrics on when to scale or recalibrate initiatives. To calculate ROI (refer to Figure 1), you start by allocating your costs, then you align them to the business outcome they will support. This gives you a Cost per Outcome, the building block for ROI. Once you can measure what each outcome costs, calculating ROI is simply a matter of comparing that cost against the value it delivers. This post outlines a practical methodology for aligning AI investments with business impact. We detail how to classify use cases, attribute costs, and identify the initiatives that drive measurable value.

AWS WAF and AWS Shield Advanced provide robust DDoS mitigation and request filtering, but estimating their combined costs can be complex. This guide helps you understand the pricing components so you can protect your web applications while keeping spend predictable.

Implementing a FinOps weekly checkpoint is a proactive approach to catch spend trends sooner and generates more meaningful insights for your monthly variance analysis. Gathering variance context throughout the month leads to a clearer, more impactful analysis. This weekly checkpoint involves regularly reviewing cost data, identifying anomalies or trends, and engaging with technical teams to understand cost change drivers.