AWS Cloud Financial Management 2023 Q3 Launch Recap

Thanks to our product and engineering teams’ tireless efforts in building new capabilities for AWS Cloud Financial Management portfolio, I get to introduce these amazing features to you. Let’s take a look at what we’ve made available for you in the last quarter.

I. Visualize your Savings Plans recommendations

With AWS Savings Plans, you commit a certain dollar amount per hour for your AWS usage for one or three year term, and in return receive up to 72% discount off On-demand pricing. Based on your historical usage, AWS provides recommendations on Savings Plans terms and their estimated hourly and monthly savings. Depending on how ambitious or conservative your organization’s purchase strategies are, you may want to verify the level of coverage and utilization for these recommendations, and decide on your own purchase terms. You can now do so by clicking on “View details” of each recommendation, and launch the detailed views of the hourly cost, coverage, and utilization of these recommendations in visual graphs. Read this user guide for more instructions.

II. Customize pricing and cost visibility with AWS Billing Conductor

AWS Billing Conductor provides a simple and consistent way to manage your chargeback process, whether you’re resellers, who generate separate invoices for end customers, or organizations that charge back AWS costs to end users. You can modify your billing rates with a discount or mark up at the global level, or specific to a service, a SKU, and/or a billing entity. At the global level, you can also choose to deactivate the application of Always Free Tier. The flexibility of setting pricing plans per billing group allows you to map the chargeback logic to your particular business needs. Such cost transparency also encourages the right consumer behavior and ultimately helps drive down your total AWS spend.

Auto account-association

With Billing Conductor, you can construct a set of member accounts in your AWS Organization to be part of a billing group that shares the same financial owner. Billing groups are mutually exclusive, meaning one account can only belong to one billing group at a time. To maintain full chargeback coverage for your organization, you can now automatically associate any newly added accounts in your organization to a default billing group. This ensures all accounts to be covered by your chargeback process, protecting your business margin.

Consistent pricing and cross-account view in AWS Cost Explorer

You let us know the value of having proforma billing views and proforma Cost and Usage reports (CURs), when you create cost visualization and invoices for your end users. Now, the proforma cost view is also available in Cost Explorer. This feature allows your end users to visualize and analyze their AWS spend independently rather than relying on you to manually create these reports for them. It also provides primary accounts the cross-account visibility to all member accounts’ spend and usage in their respective billing groups without the need of a payer account access. Read this blog for more information.

III. Optimize your use of AWS resources and application licenses with AWS Compute Optimizer

Understanding how to select the right resource type and sizes for your workloads can maximize both the performance and cost efficiency of your cloud investments. AWS Compute Optimizer tracks your resource configuration and performance and delivers recommendations that will reduce cost and improve performance.

New EC2 instance types and multi-attach EBS volumes

AWS Compute Optimizer now supports a total 662 EC2 instance types, with the recent addition of 153 E2 instance types, including the latest generation general-purpose instance families from both Intel and AMD (M7g, M7i, M7i-flex, M7a, M6a), compute optimized instances (C7gn, C7g), memory optimized instances (R7g, R7iz, R6id, R6a, X2iezn), storage optimized instances (I4g, I4i), and high-performance-computing (HPC) optimized instances (Hpc7g, Hpc6id). It also provides Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume recommendations for EBS volumes that are attached to multiple EC2 instances simultaneously.

GPU instances

Along with the rise of Machine Learning workloads, we witnessed an increased usage of Accelerated Computing instances. Running GPU instances is resource intensive. Without proper provisioning, you’ll either experience costly bills or comprised performance. Now that AWS offers rightsizing recommendations for select NVIDIA Accelerated Computing instances, you will receive personalized recommendations to determine the best GPU-based P and G family instances for their ML, HPC, and graphically intensive workloads.

SQL server support

When migrating your Microsoft SQL Server workloads to AWS, you want to make sure you’re optimizing price performance for both the underlying AWS infrastructure and SQL Server workloads that run on top of it. Compute Optimizer now extends the optimization capability from rightsizing AWS resources to optimizing application licenses. You can identify SQL Server instances on Amazon EC2 by inferred workload type property and get the rightsizing recommendation to reduce the license cost by downgrading to the appropriate SQL Server edition.

IV. Detect runaway cost early with more AWS Cost Anomaly Detection monitors

No matter how diligently you’re planning your AWS spend, you’ll still experience usage that are unplanned for, or anomalous cost compared with your historical spend patterns. AWS Cost Anomaly Detection, powered by advanced ML technologies, detect and analyze your anomalous spend within your desired scope. Previously, a management account could create a total of 100 cost monitors. With the latest enhancement, you can now create up to 501 total custom anomaly monitors, including the one AWS service monitor in the account. The increased number of cost monitors let you fine tune anomaly detection that are associated with specific linked accounts, Cost Categories, and Cost Allocation Tags. What’s even better, Cost Anomaly Detection is offered at free and auto-enabled for new AWS Cost Explore users. Learn more from this user guide.

V. Conclusions

Let us know if you find these features helpful or if you have any questions. Many of our CFM team members will be at re:Invent. We look forward to meeting you in person and understanding how we can make your CFM journey more enjoyable. This blog previews the CFM sessions and activities at re:Invent. Before I let you go, if you can spend some time to fill out the State of FinOps 2024 survey. We appreciate you sharing your knowledge and experience with the FinOps community.