The AWS Cloud Financial Management team had a dynamic third quarter, engaging with customers at events in Anaheim and Chicago. In addition to these interactions, the team rolled out several new features designed to enhance user experience. Below is a summary of the significant updates to keep you informed.
Enhanced Cost Control User Experience in the Console
AWS Cost Anomaly Detection allows users to monitor and identify unusual spending patterns based on historical data. It provides notifications with initial root cause analysis to assist in determining necessary actions. The newly updated interface (launched on August 17) offers a transparent view of anomalies, displaying the first and last dates of detection along with potential root causes. Users can now utilize AWS Identity and Access Management to manage permissions for their Cost Anomaly Detection monitors and alert subscriptions. If any permission issues arise, an error message will now appear in the “Activate IAM Access” setting within the root user account.
AWS Budgets allows for the creation of customized budget thresholds, sending regular reports and alerts to stakeholders when costs exceed pre-defined limits or when utilization rates for Reserved Instances and Savings Plans dip below targets. To expedite the setup of commonly used budgets, AWS Budgets (since September 27) now provides three pre-configured budget templates and tutorials for guidance.
Streamlined Account Organization for Cost Reporting
AWS Billing Conductor simplifies showback and chargeback processes by enabling users to group accounts, configure billing parameters, and apply custom rates. This allows for the generation of pro forma bills and Cost and Usage reports, facilitating analysis of the discrepancies between applied rates and actual AWS charges. Billing groups can now be created to limit the sharing of Reserved Instances and Savings Plans benefits, alongside volume discounts, exclusively within grouped accounts. Since July 27, users can import Organizational Units (OU) from AWS Organizations into billing groups, streamlining setup and ensuring account parity.
AWS Cost Categories helps structure cost and usage data into meaningful categories using AWS dimensions like account, service, and Cost Allocation Tag. As of September 27, users can apply cost category rules retroactively to any month within the previous 12 months, adapting categorization needs to historical data. Furthermore, AWS Cost Categories (as of August 18) now support Out-of-Cycle cost categorization, allowing for the creation of rules to capture enterprise support costs.
Improved Recommendations for Compute Resources
AWS Compute Optimizer provides recommendations for AWS resources, including Amazon EC2 instance types and AWS Lambda functions, aimed at optimizing cost and performance through analysis of historical utilization metrics. As of August 3, the service became generally available in five new AWS regions: Osaka, Hong Kong, Bahrain, Cape Town, and Milan. From August 15, organizations can designate a member account as a delegated administrator in the Compute Optimizer console, empowering them to identify rightsizing opportunities across all accounts. On September 29, AWS Compute Optimizer expanded its recommendations to include 37 new EC2 instance types, bringing the total to 425 supported types. Additionally, it now analyzes physical memory utilization with specific memory metrics for Windows instances.
Conclusion
We hope these newly introduced features prove beneficial to your cloud financial management practices. As always, we encourage you to reach out to your AWS contact to share your thoughts on how we can enhance our product capabilities. For further insights, check out this blog post for additional information. Also, for authoritative insights, visit this source on the topic. Moreover, if you are interested in employee onboarding processes, this is an excellent resource worth exploring.
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