Category: Cloud Cost Optimization

As organizations expand, FinOps teams require a comprehensive overview of AWS Savings Plans commitments to maximize utilization efficiency. This solution involves implementing monitoring systems and automated alerts to identify underutilized Savings Plans within the eligible return period. In this blog post, we provide AWS CloudFormation templates that create AWS Step Functions state machine, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) topic, Amazon EventBridge scheduler, and necessary AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles to automate the monitoring of newly purchased Savings Plans and highlight those that are underutilized.

Building on our previous discussions about AWS generative AI cost optimization, the fourth blog of the five-part blog series focuses on maximizing value from Amazon Q, AWS’s generative AI-powered assistant. While our earlier posts covered custom model development with Amazon EC2 and SageMaker AI and foundation models with Amazon Bedrock, today we’ll explore strategies to optimize costs when implementing Amazon Q. From selecting the right pricing tier and implementing strategic user management to optimizing content indexing and improving cost predictability, we’ll share practical approaches that help you balance functionality with cost efficiency. Whether you’re using Amazon Q Business for your generative AI–powered assistant or Amazon Q Developer to enhance developer productivity, these best practices will help you make informed decisions about your Q implementation.

We’re excited to engage with the FinOps community at FinOps X 2025 in San Diego, June 2-5. If you’re looking to spend quality time with the AWS team, here’s where you can find us from reception parties on Monday evening, keynote, breakout sessions, booth, and customer meetings. Can’t wait to see you all soon!

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.

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.

You can use Amazon Athena, a lightweight serverless, analytics tool, to query your AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR). This enables you to dive into your cost and usage data for spend reporting and optimization analysis. However, you may not know all the opportunities you can optimize your Amazon S3 costs by taking advantage of S3 Lifecycle configuration.

As many organizations are looking to achieve financial success through effective Cloud Financial Management (CFM) strategies, Infor, the global leading software provider, has been experimenting with different practices, from cost reporting to optimization. In this blog post, we will share their success and learning that helped achieve over $2 million in savings through automation and modernization initiatives.