AWS Cloud Financial Management

With great pleasure, I am happy to share with you the ten features recently added to the AWS Cloud Financial Management portfolio of services. We hope that these ten new features will help accomplish your daily FinOps tasks more effectively. These new features are like our holiday gifts to you. Enjoy your holiday and these special gifts from us. We look forward to hearing about your experiences with them.

Today, we are excited to announce custom billing views, a new feature within AWS Billing and Cost Management that allows you to grant member accounts in your organization access to cost and usage view spanning multiple member accounts. Many of you have teams that own multiple AWS accounts and told us that you want to have a single view of cost data for each team. At the same time, you want to minimize the number of people who have access to the management account that owns the organization-level cost data. With the newly launched custom billing views, you can now make cost and usage data spanning multiple member accounts available to a designated member account in your organization. Let’s dive into how you can set this up.

Today, AWS announced Invoice Configuration, which provides you the ability to customize your invoices to fit your unique business needs. Invoice Configuration enables you to receive separate AWS invoices for each of your business entities such as subsidiaries, cost centers, legal entities, departments etc., while being a part of the same AWS Organization.

Invoice Configuration enables you to split AWS charges on a business entity level, designate a separate Invoice Receiver, and receive separate invoices for each of your business entities. This not only enables you to process your AWS Invoices faster, but also enables you to track funding for each business entity separately and enables you to customize your AWS Invoices to adhere with unique FinOps processes that you may have across your business entities.

Today AWS announced the general availability release of Data Exports for FOCUS 1.0. You can now create exports of your AWS cost and usage data with the FOCUS 1.0 schema with significant specification conformance improvements compared to the public preview released in June 2024. FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Standard), supported by the FinOps Foundation, is an open-source cloud cost and usage specification that provides standardization to normalize cost and usage data and simplify cloud financial management across multiple sources. With Data Exports for FOCUS 1.0, you can easily aggregate, query, and analyze cost and usage data from various sources.

Today, we’re excited to announce the enhanced AWS Pricing Calculator that is now available as a public preview feature within the AWS Billing and Cost Management Console. The new capability provides accurate cost estimates for new workloads or modifications to your existing AWS usage by incorporating eligible discounts. You can now save time and improve the accuracy of cost estimation for migrating workloads from one Region to another, modifying existing or planning new workloads, and planning for commitment purchases. To get started, login into the AWS Billing and Cost Management Console and click Pricing Calculator under the “Budget and Planning” section in the left navigation, or go to the pricing calculator page and click the link “Log in to the AWS console to estimate your costs incorporating your discounts.”

Today, AWS enhanced Cost Anomaly Detection with the ability to provide multiple root causes for cost anomalies. This new capability empowers FinOps professionals and cloud financial managers to quickly identify and resolve the underlying factors driving unexpected cost increases. For FinOps teams striving to optimize cloud spend and maintain financial accountability, this enhancement offers deeper insights and faster resolution times. This post explains how this improvement can help you resolve anomalies more efficiently and answers some frequently asked questions.

Starting today, you can easily model your next Savings Plans purchases and evaluate the impact on cost, coverage, and utilization in the AWS Billing and Cost Management Console. You can input your own commitment amount or generate a recommended commitment that is designed to maximize your cost savings. Furthermore, you can customize your analysis by selecting a specific lookback period and/or excluding expiring Savings Plans to plan for upcoming renewals.

Starting today, AWS Compute Optimizer will give recommendations to clean up idle resources. AWS Compute Optimizer historically has been focused on providing rightsizing recommendations to save cost and improve performance. To help you drive further cost savings, we are expanding the focus to now include detecting and recommending cleanup of idle recommendations. With this launch, you will get recommendations for idle EBS volumes, ECS tasks on running on Fargate, EC2 instances, EC2 Auto Scaling groups, and RDS instances.

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.