This guidance offers a comprehensive approach to establishing a Cloud Financial Management (CFM) capability for effectively managing and optimizing expenses related to cloud services. The CFM capability includes real-time visibility, cost and usage analysis, and supports various aspects such as spend dashboards, optimization, spend limits, chargeback, anomaly detection, response, budgeting, and forecasting. It provides a structured architecture to help you make informed decisions and attribute resource costs to relevant teams, enabling cost optimization techniques across your environment and resources.
Architecture Overview
Step 1:
Utilize the AWS Pricing Calculator to estimate costs and model solutions before deployment. For existing on-premises workloads, AWS Migration Evaluator offers a migration assessment with projected cost estimates and savings.
Step 2:
Employ Cost Allocation Tags to categorize costs in AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Cost & Usage Report (AWS CUR). For grouping multiple tags or dimensions, AWS Cost Categories can be utilized.
Step 3:
Activate Cost Explorer and generate an AWS CUR to report on aggregate cloud cost and usage, subsequently saving the report to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket.
Step 4:
Monitor cost and usage by setting up alerts in AWS Budgets and AWS Cost Anomaly Detection. When actual, forecasted, or anomalous spending surpasses a predefined threshold, notifications can be sent via email, Slack, Amazon Chime, or AWS Chatbot. AWS Compute Optimizer provides recommendations for right-sizing workloads.
Step 5:
Integrate Amazon Athena with AWS CUR to generate reports through SQL-like queries. Utilize Cloud Intelligence Dashboards, powered by Amazon QuickSight, to visualize data.
Step 6:
Purchasing commitments such as Savings Plans and Reserved Instances (RIs) for both new and existing workloads can significantly reduce costs, up to 72%.
Implementation Resources
The successful implementation of a Cloud Financial Management (CFM) function necessitates a robust tagging strategy for your environment. This tagging strategy, as discussed in the Establishing Your Cloud Foundation on AWS whitepaper, involves creating a tagging dictionary and incorporating CFM tags and their defined values. These tags should be widely disseminated among different stakeholders and teams to facilitate effective tracking of spending and cost allocation.
By following these guidelines, you can establish an efficient CFM capability, track cloud spend, and plan for cost optimization. This approach fosters cost awareness across various business units and application teams, promoting data-driven decision-making without hampering innovation.
It’s important to note that the sample code, software libraries, and related technology provided in this guidance are AWS Content and should not be used in production accounts or with critical data. Testing, securing, and optimizing these resources for production-grade use is your responsibility. Deploying AWS Content may lead to AWS charges, such as those incurred by running Amazon EC2 instances or using Amazon S3 storage.
