Managing Costs with Cloud Financial Management Technical Implementation Playbooks (CFM TIPs) for AWS

Earlier this year, we announced the launch of CFM TIPs for AWS, the complete playbook for implementing effective Cloud Financial Management practices in your organization. Based on our experience working with many of you, we learned that you want to build your Cloud Financial Management (CFM) capabilities, but have challenges due to the lack of consolidated implementation guidelines. With AWS CFM TIPs, you can now streamline your FinOps journey with a collection of guidelines that provide structured approaches for setting up CFM capabilities and best practices for cost governance and optimization opportunities.

What is AWS CFM TIPs?

Utilizing the Cloud Financial Management framework and the Cost Optimization pillar in the AWS Well-Architected Framework, we have built step-by-step playbooks to help you implement a specific set of CFM capabilities in your organization. This results in a collection of curated best practices and mechanisms that ensure ongoing, self-service cost optimization and governance. The CFM TIPs are created and constantly reviewed by AWS subject matter experts to keep content up to date.

The CFM TIPs has four pillars:

• Culture change: How to create a cost-aware culture inside the organization with CFM best practices.
• Foundations: How to set cost management guardrails appropriate to your organization. Set budgets and cost anomaly monitors, review rightsizing recommendations from AWS Compute Optimizer, identifying idle and underutilized resources from AWS Trusted Advisor.
• Visualizations: How to implement cost measurement dashboarding, relevant to the customers organization structure. Learn how to use AWS Cost Explorer, enable AWS Data Exports and get advanced cost visibility opportunities in Cloud Intelligence Dashboards for deeper level of visibility.
• Service Cost Optimization Playbooks: How to master cost optimization for different AWS services. Every playbook covers a specific AWS service according to the top-down approach, where you start with identifying idle and underutilized resources and finish with rightsizing resources.

Figure 1. Example of Cost Optimization Playbooks in CFM TIPs

CFM TIPs for AWS provides the technical guidance on how you can advance your CFM capabilities. It helps organizations build in-house CFM best practices aligned with the AWS CFM framework. More than 30 AWS services across different product families are covered in the CFM TIPs, where you can dive deep into the technical optimization details of the specific AWS services.

Figure 2. AWS CFM and CFM TIPs

Why implement the CFM TIPs?

As your cloud adoption grows, you may find it challenging to optimize cloud costs due to lack of expertise and proper visibility. The CFM TIPs addresses these challenges by providing prescriptive guidance that allows you to focus on your relevant topics for implementation. We recommend incorporating the CFM TIPS into your software development lifecycle, cloud project planning, and the ongoing cloud cost optimization initiatives.

Utilizing the CFM TIPs will assist you in adhering to the principles of the frugal architect, recommended by Werner Vogels, AWS CTO, and ensure designing and maintaining cost-conscious, sustainable architectures. By establishing cost visibility and implementing controls, you create the foundation for cost-aware architectures and enable regular optimization activities, which are covered in the Service Cost Optimization Playbooks pillar, for ongoing efficiency.

The CFM TIPs will aid in accelerating your capabilities in Cloud Financial Management, fostering cost ownership within teams, and equipping you with the necessary knowledge for monitoring and optimizing specific AWS services.

Getting started

The self-service CFM TIPs workshop is publicly available, you can start with “Culture Change”, followed by implementing guardrails from “Foundations”, and learn best practices for “Visualizations”. For those of you with mature CFM practices, you can still find ideas to improve cost visibility and governance posture. When ready, you can leverage the “Service Cost Optimization Playbooks” and focus on specific playbook for optimization.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we introduced the CFM TIPs, which allows you to build more cost-efficient infrastructures for your applications. We would love to hear your feedback and if CFM TIPs helped you to optimize your cloud spend and usage or if you have ideas for improvement.  Please share these feedback with us via aws-cfm-tips@amazon.com.