Category: Announcements

In response to customer requests for a more consistent cost savings experience and broader set of recommendations, AWS Trusted Advisor is expanding its capabilities. We’re excited to announce the integration of 15 new checks from AWS Cost Optimization Hub into Trusted Advisor. This significant update provides more actionable insights to help you optimize your AWS spend.

As organizations scale cloud usage, understanding cost variations becomes increasingly complex. Many of you have told us that you sometimes had to spend hours analyzing why costs changed from one month to another. To address this, we’re excited to announce a new cost comparison feature in AWS Cost Explorer that provides automated month-over-month cost change analysis. This feature enables you to quickly identify, understand, and explain variations in your AWS spending. With this new feature, you can now pinpoint the largest cost changes across any cost dimension, such as services, accounts and regions, and drill down into detailed explanations of these changes, including shifts in usage patterns, changes in commitment-based discounts, and applied credits within seconds.

Today, we’re excited to announce the general availability of the authenticated AWS Pricing Calculator in the AWS Billing and Cost Management Console. The new capability improves the accuracy of cost estimates for new workloads or modifications to your existing AWS usage by incorporating eligible discounts and commitment savings. You can now easily model cost changes for things such as migrating workloads between regions, modifying existing or planning new workloads, and planning for commitment purchases.

Starting today, AWS Compute Optimizer delivers new recommendations for your Amazon Aurora DB clusters. Compute Optimizer analyzes the cost of your clusters and identifies opportunities to leverage Aurora I/O-Optimized cluster storage configuration to save cost and improve price predictability for your most I/O-intensive workloads.

While San Diego’s famous June gloom may have given FinOps attendees overcast skies, the energy inside the FinOps X conference was anything but gloomy. Within just 1.5 days, we engaged in many insightful conversations. As a return, we have brought with us several feature enhancements that will hopefully bring more sunshine to your day-to-day FinOps life.

AWS announced new capabilities in AWS Budgets that provides greater flexibility in how you track and manage your AWS spend. These enhancements include support for additional cost metrics (net unblended costs and net amortized costs), an ability to exclude specific dimension values when creating budgets (such as services, accounts, and instance types), new filtering capabilities for charge types for fine-grained control to include or exclude AWS Savings Plans (SPs) or Reservation (RI) upfront charges, recurring fees, taxes, and credits, and enhanced API functionality that supports filter expressions that are consistent with AWS Cost Explorer.

With re:Invent 2024 in the books, and over 50 launch announcements, here are four that we’re most excited about. The overarching theme of these launches appears to be leveraging Amazon’s automation capabilities to optimize costs and improve efficiency for customers.

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.