Category: AWS Cost Explorer

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.

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.

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, 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.

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.

Our product teams have spared no effort in the past few months developing new capabilities, so that we can bring the latest advancements to FinOps X. Let’s take a moment to recap the product announcements made at FinOps X and how they can help accomplish your FinOps goals.

Given cloud invoice timing and the corporate closing calendar, variances between the AWS CUR and the GL are common for many companies. Our recommendation is to document your financial closing process, and educate leadership on any identified variance drivers. Calculating the variance percentage between the finalized AWS CUR and your GL entry to use as a talking point can also enhance understanding of the financial process.

If you’re scratching your head and trying to catch up with all the re:Invent launch announcements from the AWS Cloud Financial Management team, let me walk you through how your FinOps experience may be improved for better with the latest capabilities that were just released last week at AWS re:Invent 2023. I’ve also included recordings of these launch announcements, so you can watch these at your own pace.

We have extended the history and improved the granularity of data available in AWS Cost Explorer. Cost Explorer by default now supports 14 months of cost and usage data at daily granularity. In addition, customers have the option to enable up to 38 months of history at a monthly granularity, and they have the option to enable 14 days of resource level data for any AWS service at daily granularity. Each of these features is offered for free.

Today, AWS launched a unified Billing and Cost Management console to help you manage your AWS cloud finances more easily and efficiently. The unified console includes a new home page with insights and recommendations to help you make faster, better-informed decisions, more intuitive navigation to streamline your workflows, and improved resources to help you learn and implement Cloud Financial Management best practices. This post explains how you can use the unified Billing and Cost Management console to manage your AWS cloud finances and answers frequently asked questions.