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FinOps Foundation Insights

AWS re:Invent 2024 FinOps Updates

December 16, 2024

Key Insight: At re:Invent 2024, AWS announced numerous product enhancements that help FinOps Practitioners and their organizations optimize their cloud usage. The FinOps Foundation caught up with several AWS Product Managers at re:Invent and asked them what their teams have delivered and how these updates will impact Practitioners.

These updates span from pricing calculators and commitment analyzers to help make choices before purchasing, to allocating and optimizing what you are already using, and finally to governing and granular invoicing. These updates show that AWS is committed to helping Practitioners perform key FinOps Capabilities.


Amazon Web Services (AWS) is known for delivering a myriad of product announcements at AWS re:Invent each year, and we’re happy to share all of the new FinOps updates that came out at this year’s event.

Watch the highlights

Watch the FinOps Foundation December Virtual Summit where Bowen Wang, Principal Product Manager at AWS, walks us through all the key enhancements:

Bowen Wang shared that AWS likes to think of re:Invent product announcements as holiday gifts for all of their customers. Hear what AWS delivered this year for Cloud Financial Management and FinOps.

Dig deeper into the announcements

The FinOps Foundation recorded these interviews with AWS Product Managers who shared what their teams delivered to help FinOps Practitioners. These updates align with several key FinOps Capabilities.

Forecasting | Budgeting

Practicing FinOps involves accurately Forecasting the costs of building and delivering the products and services that your organization offers, and Budgeting to meet those forecasted costs. These activities help an organization understand their spending and plan for the future.

1. Enhanced AWS Pricing Calculator

AWS has offered a pricing calculator in the AWS Billing and Cost Management Console since 2018 to help customers estimate the cost of AWS workloads, but the calculator has not historically included applicable discounts, and pricing had to be exported and combined with usage data to get an idea of actual costs.

Jeremiah Meyers shared the enhanced AWS Pricing Calculator, now available in public preview, which allows customers to interactively estimate the cost of specific workloads, or the entire bill – including applicable discounts. Further, historical usage data can be imported to calculate cost estimates directly in the console.

Jeremiah Meyers, Senior Technical Product Manager at AWS, talks about the enhanced AWS Pricing Calculator, now available in public preview.

2. AWS Savings Plans Purchase Analyzer

Mary Nachimov, Senior Product Manager at AWS, talked with us about the new Savings Plans Purchase Analyzer, which is available in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console. Savings Plans Analyzer enables customers to simulate different Savings Plans commitments to understand their impact on cost, coverage, and utilization.

The analyzer allows you to choose a custom date range for calculations (within the last 60 days) and include/exclude certain days or weeks that may have unusual usage patterns. You can also exclude Savings Plans that will expire in the next 90 days to better analyze the need for renewal. Finally, customers can enter a custom hourly commitment amount and compare it to the recommended commitment amount to reach a precisely optimal commitment.

Mary Nachimov, Senior Product Manager at AWS, discusses the benefits of the new AWS Savings Plans Purchase Analyzer.

Data Ingestion

Data Ingestion and normalization is a challenge for FinOps Practitioners that the industry aims to ease with the development of FOCUS, the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification. AWS and other leading cloud service providers are committed to the FOCUS Project.

3. FOCUS 1.0 with AWS Columns (GA)

Back in June this year, AWS announced support for FOCUS 1.0 in preview. Now, AWS has announced the General Availability (GA) of this support for FOCUS 1.0 with AWS Columns. This announcement was much anticipated by FinOps Practitioners who are eager for a simple way to unify cost and usage data from multiple providers for analysis and reporting. Now, Practitioners can get FOCUS 1.0-formatted data from AWS, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle. AWS offers a conformance gap report to help Practitioners understand how the 1.0 Data Export currently deviates from the FOCUS 1.0 Specification requirements.

Zach Erdman, Product Manager at AWS, shares the General Availability of Data Exports for FOCUS 1.0 with AWS Columns.

Reporting & Analytics

Organizations gain insights out of their cost and usage data with Reporting & Analytics. Generative AI is increasingly being used to assist with this critical business use case, as it democratizes billing data so any user can get answers out of a dataset using natural language.

4. Cost Analysis in Amazon Q Developer (GA)

Initially launched in preview back in April, the cost analysis capability in Amazon Q Developer is now Generally Available. This AI-powered assistant can help any stakeholder get answers out of cost and usage data simply by asking it questions in natural language. For example, you can query “What were my top 5 most expensive services last month?” and Q Developer will respond in natural language, and provide a deep link to Cost Explorer to visualize the analysis.

Liam Greenamyre, Senior Technical Product Manager at AWS, shares that customers can now pull usage metrics from CloudWatch Container Insights to inform EKS Split Cost Allocation.

Invoicing & Chargeback | Rate Optimization

Rate Optimization, or reducing the rate you pay for consumption-based resources and services, is often achieved by purchasing commitment discounts.  A best practice when purchasing commitment discounts is to buy them at the highest-level account or organization, as discounts will flow down to applicable resources in lower-level accounts. However, this often creates a challenge for Invoicing & Chargeback, namely, figuring out which accounts to charge back for the usage of applicable discounts.

5. AWS Invoice Configuration

Invoice Configuration is a powerful new feature that enables customers to reap the benefits of buying volume discounts at the top-level management account in their AWS Organization, while also receiving separate invoices for each of the linked member accounts in that Organization. Customers with Consolidated Billing enabled can configure separate AWS invoices for member accounts that correspond to their different business units. A separate receiver can be designated for each invoice.

Now, customers can more easily ensure that volume discounts will flow to all linked accounts in their AWS Organization, while also enabling purchase orders and invoicing at a more granular business unit level.

Workload Optimization

Core the practice of FinOps is optimizing technology usage to generate the most value at the lowest cost. At a granular level, this means continuous Workload Optimization must be performed to ensure optimal performance without wasted spending.

6. Split EKS Cost Allocation: now supports usage data from CloudWatch Container Insights

AWS helps customers split and allocate the cost of container resources at a granular level for both Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Split Cost Allocation Data gives cost and usage data at the task level for ECS and at the pod level for EKS.

Now, when you configure this for EKS, you can capture CPU and memory utilization metrics either through Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, or this newly launched support for Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights. Pulling in this usage data enables more accurate allocation of your shared container costs and gives you better insight into potential optimizations.

7. Amazon Aurora Rightsizing

This year, AWS also expanded its Rightsizing Recommendations in AWS Compute Optimizer to include database (DB) instances running Aurora MySQL-compatible edition and Aurora PostgreSQL-compatible engines. With this update, Compute Optimizer now supports recommendations for Amazon RDS for MySQL, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, and Amazon Aurora database engines.

These recommendations help you identify idle database instances, choose the optimal DB instance class, and migrate to the latest graviton processors, so you can eliminate the costs for unused resources and improve the performance of under-provisioned workloads.

Compute Optimizer automatically uses Amazon CloudWatch metrics (database connections, CPU, and IOPS utilization) to generate Aurora DB optimization recommendations, and these recommendations can be improved if you enable Amazon RDS Performance Insights on your DB instances.

8. Idle resource detection and cleanup

Eliminating idle resources from your environment is an obvious first-step when optimizing your cloud costs, as these resources are incurring charges but not benefiting you or your customers.

Rick Ochs, Senior Manager of Cloud Optimization at AWS, noted that AWS Compute Optimizer has historically been used primarily to deliver rightsizing recommendations, but with this update, customers will now have a single idle cleanup view which is displayed in both Compute Optimizer and Cost Optimization Hub. Customers can prioritize resource cleanup based on the associated cost savings.

Rick Ochs, Senior Manager of Cloud Optimization at AWS, talks with us about AWS’s new idle resource detection and cleanup feature in both Compute Optimizer and Cost Optimization Hub.

Anomaly Management

Identifying and remedying unexpected spending patterns, or Anomaly Management, is a key Capability for keeping spending under control and on budget.

9. Enhanced Root Cause Analysis in Anomaly Detection

Cost Anomaly Detection uses machine learning to compare historical spend to actual spend, and reports an anomaly if the actual spend exceeds the expected amount by a certain threshold. Cost Anomaly Detection has historically given the top 2 root causes of an anomaly, but the new capability shows up to 10 root causes for every anomaly above $1. Each root cause includes a direct link to AWS Cost Explorer, where you can do a more thorough analysis.

Further, the getAnomalies AWS Cost Explorer API has been updated to support the new root cause capabilities, so customers who want to programmatically integrate Cost Anomaly Detection into their existing workflows or build custom applications can do so.

Closing

It’s hard to believe 2024 is nearing a close, but this year was an exciting one for FinOps Practitioners, as AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud have delivered dozens of product features and enhancements that help get value out of cloud investments. In addition to their individual cloud provider updates, all four of these major cloud providers have also committed to FOCUS and currently offer datasets that conform with version 1.0. We look forward to journeying through the evolution of FinOps and FOCUS in 2025 with all of you!

Topics
  • Cloud Provider Updates
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