Getting Started with Cloud Financial Management | AWS Events

- [Lisa] All right, folks, we are about ready to get started. As we go, if you've got questions, or you need to switch your audio, you have those options in that sidebar, but I wanna welcome you to our session. And thank you so much for being here today, to learn about Getting Started with Cloud Financial Management. I am Lisa Harnett, the host for CFM Talks, and these talks are about 30 minutes in time, the rest of is devoted to questions from you. So as we design each of these talks, we design

them to answer questions and common questions that we hear from our customers. So today's talk, we are talking about people who are starting to get set up with Cloud Financial Management programs. Are you asking about allocating costs, how to make people accountable, how to stay on budget? Or starting to figure out whether your different applications are profitable, not profitable. How do you start answering these questions? That is what today's talk is about. So as we started this call, we had

a poll asking you what your experience in this space, you know, what's your role in this space? And so I'm gonna go ahead and share that back to give you an idea where, what we have in the call today. So 44% of you guys are not in any kind of a role related to Cloud Financial Management, and the rest of you, most of the rest of you have got less than one year, but there is also a sizeable chunk I see out there with more than two years. So some of this will be a reminder for those of you guys in

the more experienced range, but I think this is a great place to be if you're just getting started, so thank you so much for being here. And know that you're not alone. We've got a variety of experiences here, and the link for this presentation will come out to you tomorrow, and an email along with the recording, if you wanna go ahead and share it out. But at this point, I'm gonna go ahead and turn it over to Lauren and Bryce who will take you through the agenda. Thank you so much for being her

e. And as I mentioned before, go ahead and put those questions in that question panel. And we've got lots of time in this to hold out for answering them, thanks. - [Lauren] Thanks Lisa. Hello everyone, and thanks for joining today. We are gonna be walking through, getting started with Cloud Financial Management. So the first section we'll be going through the different concepts that make up CFM. Once we all have a common understanding of that, we'll then be diving into how do you actually take t

hose concepts and turn them into an action plan. So what steps do I need to go through to actually start my journey? And then we'll wrap up we'll with what tools does AWS have to help you along the way? So starting with our concepts, if you've joined one of our webinars before, you're probably familiar with the screen. We break up our pillars of CFM into these different phases here that you'll see, Plan, Run, See, Save. One thing to note is that this is not chronological by any means. So you mig

ht have seen this in a different arrangement of See, Save, Plan, Run, but we have listed below each all of the tools that AWS has that can help you along the way, in each of those four pillars. So while these are concepts, today's focus is gonna be on, how do I take these concepts, and again, actually have an action plan? How do I start that in my own organization? And so we'll be going through a six-step plan for you today, of how to actually get started. First thing to note here is that the ne

w consumption model of cloud is very different than your typical data center. So you'll notice here that you're bringing together technology and finance teams, and technology teams aren't just technology teams anymore. They're doing things that are normally associated with finance or operational teams, they're product owners. And so air role takes on a little bit of a different shape with this new cloud technology model. So knowing that this is so different than what you might be used to in the

past, how do we set you up for success? We'll walk through what tools we have, and again, that six-step plan to make sure that you're successful across this journey, no matter where you may fall on that spectrum of, I just got started, I'm halfway through, or you wanna iterate upon what you already have going in your organization. So where I typically like to start when first engaging with customers is asking this question of, what does good look like to you? Very simple question. And oftentimes

that answer can be either unknown, or really complex. So this graph kind of helps demonstrate a couple things that can help you answer that question. First off, when you're looking at this graph, our focus is on that purple line, that unit cost. Not so much on those teal bars that are representing usage. That unit cost can be something like cost per customer, cost per transaction, number of customers that you have. It's a business metric that makes sense to you and your organization. So by focu

sing in on a KPI, a key performance indicator, like that unit cost metric, we're not so focused on that usage. You might see your usage scale up, but there's always gonna be some optimization lever that you can pull along the way that can help you to reduce that unit cost, to show that you're being more efficient in your usage, even as those teal bars may grow. So yes, your bill might look a little different, it might be growing, but if you're seeing that unit cost go down that purple line, you'

re able to do more with less. So by focusing in on that, we can really help set you up for success. Once you figure out what is that purple line for you? What unit cost is really attractive to me, or can help me to measure success in my own organization? Once we have that, we can start on this six-step plan that I've been referring to. So the first step here is CFM ownership. Determining a person or a team who's ultimately responsible for all of your CFM activities. This will really help you whe

n you're driving any sort of execution of, we wanna start tracking X, Y, and Z, we wanna report this way. By having a team or a person dedicated to that, you lose that finger pointing of maybe someone else is doing cost optimization, so I don't have to. You really get that ownership piece set first, so that the teams know who to go to when, if they have a question on CFM, and you can start driving change within your organization. Once you have that piece in place, you really wanna make sure that

your finance and technology stakeholders are best friends throughout this process. They should constantly be in line, and that organizational partnership will help solidify what your work is doing. By having a common language between those two teams, they might not be focusing on the same things on their day-to-day basis, but in terms of CFM activities, you wanna make sure that they're aligned in everything that they do, so that moving forward, you have that input from both teams. You wanna mak

e sure that they're able to participate in each other's activities, such as having the technology folks in on those cloud budgeting meetings with finance. And then finance, maybe learning from the technology teams on different payment options, what spot usage might look like. So having them become more cloud savvy while then the tech teams become more finance savvy will help to really drive forward that change within the org to I'm a cost to wear culture. Those first two steps are really those f

oundational building blocks. So those are gonna be the most important to get set in stone right away, so then you can focus on steps three to six, which AWS has tools to help you with. Those first two are really strategy based, and more of the softer skill side of things. So once you get to this third part, this enabling cost allocation, that's where we can bring in some tooling from AWS's side to help you with that piece. So being able to tie back the cloud usage to the lines of business that a

re ultimately responsible for that usage is key here. And you can use things like AWS Cost allocation tags to help you along the way to be able to do that and to report on that easier. Once you're able to do that, you wanna make sure that those folks who are responsible for the cloud spend have visibility into that. So things like AWS Cost Explorer can be extremely helpful there, by providing those dashboards that'll be unified across teams. So if you do find those KPIs that you're interested it

in, if you are asking for change within a team, or a cost center, they can see what data you're referring to, and it's the same across the board. So being able to visualize your spend is really important, and it'll help with that KPI aspect. Then we can move on to that cost optimization piece. What levers do I have in my back pocket that I can pull, so that I can consistently be showing more efficiency in my usage, doing more with less. Here's where things like AWS Cost Explorer, EC2 Rightsizin

g Recommendations are fantastic. This will pinpoint for you different instances that could either be terminated if they seem like they might be idle, or that there might be a Rightsizing option that you can downsize, to then be more efficient in your EC2 usage. By having this pinpointed for you, you don't have to go search for those opportunities, AWS will bring those to you, so it reduces on that manual section of reporting. And lastly, in the six-step plan, we have our Forecasting and Monitori

ng piece. No one likes that surprise bill. So how do I make sure I don't have that at the end of every month? By using things like AWS Budgets and AWS Cost Anomaly Detection, you can avoid that surprise bill by being alerted when you might be just close to reaching that threshold, or when you've actually reached that threshold. So you can do that based on forecasted spend, or actual spend, so that you're not surprised at the end of the month, and you can take action, and be more proactive, if yo

u are budding up against those thresholds, you've set in place. And the last piece here, not necessarily a step, but something that should be integrated throughout your whole cloud journey is continuous education. You wanna make sure that your teams are consistently improving their cloud IQ, whether that's through doing something like the AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam. You can take that virtually now. So that's one way that you can continuously improve your cloud IQ, or attending things like works

hops, or reaching out to AWS, we can help in a variety of different ways. But always being able to improve your cloud IQ, making sure that you're all on the same page as the cloud is ever evolving, and we're always introducing new services and new tools that can help you along that journey. So now we've gone through that concept side of things. How do you actually move this into an actionable plan? I will hand this over to Bryce and he'll walk through then all of those steps in a little bit more

detail, on how you can actually start implementing those into your org. - [Bryce] All right, thank you, Lauren. One thing that, for those that may have joined late, that we do encourage is questions. We certainly have prepared time at the end to make sure we get questions addressed, but if questions come up for you, please feel more than welcome to put them in the chat now, and we can make sure we benchmark those, and grab those for questions later, appreciate it. So as we start our journey, a

lot of customers that we engage with are pretty surprised that what comes up first is about this idea of ownership. They're surprised that it's not, well, what you need to do is you need to go get wins. And so you need to establish a secret practice to drive efficiency in the portfolio. Or it's not starting with visibility to say that, "Well, I don't even know where I'm spending money today, "so let's go work on the visibility piece." Based on experience, the reason why we start with ownership i

s because even in those instances where you need to drive efficiency in the portfolio, and you're gonna be interacting with engineering teams, as soon as you start to try to build a partnership with them to say, "Hey, we notice that these EC2 instances "can be right size," or, "We recognize that there's "an opportunity for Savings Plans to be purchased." The response back will be, well, what authority do you come to us with? Why should we pay attention? And that's where this ownership piece beco

mes very, very key because upfront, if you're able to establish the importance of the CFM practice within a team, within an organization, or more broadly across the portfolio of the entire company, that's then provides you the mantra. It establishes that strategic vision that you can set in that mission statement about what is your team tasked with, who's responsible for tracking and maintaining costs. And then you can then go, later, when we get into the later steps and talk about building thos

e organizational partnerships. Because in this ownership piece, well, once this is established, that gives you that opportunity to know, I am responsible for these types of costs. And I will start in, not only getting the visibility into the portfolio, but also helping drive efficiency. And so, as we talk about the actual implementation of this ownership piece, this is really what starts that unfreezing process to help migrate, remove the organization in the direction of cloud financial manageme

nt, because you're creating that need within the organization, that visibility that's needed to then go start building those partnerships, which is that second step for us. So in that partnership piece, the reason why this comes up second, is because once we have that ownership defined, we have to recognize that our CFM journey collectively, as an organization, is not going to be complete, unless we bring others on the journey with us, right? So it may be that you started out your CFM journey be

cause tough questions were getting asked about, well, who's spending the money, where are they spending it? And what are they spending it on? And that may have been from the finance people, or it may have been from the engineering side where they say, "Hey, you know, gee-whiz, we're spending way and more on our product than what we had originally anticipated. Why, what's going on? Why is that? And so it's in partnering with these different organizations, you start to build a robust practice that

helps to really understand the visibility side, because as the organization starts to implement a CFM journey, there's going to be items within the organization that also have to be updated, and historically may not have had to have been addressed. For example, in working with the finance organization, internally, you may need to start update updating your different internal accounting practices. You know, historically when you engage with a third party to provide services, you probably did it

at a negotiated rate for a set contract period. Well now in the cloud where you have variable spend being introduced on a large scale, the finance may be saying, "Hey, we have a problem," because the purchase acquisition that was established, isn't matching the month-end bill to be able to pay back that invoice. So, because it doesn't match, there's nothing that we can do, right? And so that's where it starts building this partnership with the finance organization, to really start understanding

this Cloud Financial Management, and how the organization needs to be moved in the direction of maturing in that practice. With the engineering side of the house, you know, what's funny is I've never met a engineer that enjoyed spending money in the cup, right? They were always trying to produce some type of value, some type of function. So as you start to engage age with them to do Rightsizing, or to introduce efficiency into the portfolio with maybe adoption of new functionality coming from, l

ike, for example, GP three, for your EBS volumes, if you have that established partnership with those technical teams, you are able to understand the potential impact of decisions that are being made. And you can know start avoiding situations where you're trying to be penny wise, but pound foolish in trying to implement a cost optimize mechanism because an engineering team, as a partner was able to influence and guide that CFM journey. So those are some instances there of making sure that that

partnership is being established, and how you go about doing that. Once we have those first two to opportunities with the ownership and the partnership defiant, that's where we get into the third step of really understanding that cost allocation piece. This in like what Lauren mentioned at the beginning, this is where we could start introducing tooling to really help accelerate that journey. And the previous two steps, it's very much trying to influence without necessary authority, or explicit o

wnership. Even if it's been buy-in from the highest levels about CFM and the need for those practices, it could be challenging to then start interacting and engaging those partnerships. And so the reason why cost allocation then follows on from those first two steps is because unless someone is getting the bill for the charges that they're incurring, it may be challenging to get buy-in into the CFM program. You know, in referencing back to the engineering side, they also, you know, even in the s

urvey we saw most, or maybe not over 50%, but pretty close to 50% of the folks on the call are not in a traditional CFM position. So you may be the recipient of a lot of what the CFM organization's coming to you, and talking to you about. So you're living this sort of day in and day out that you're not enjoying the inefficiency that's being spent in the cloud, but you're challenged with how do you balance what the CFM team is telling you with delivering value in the cloud? Because that's what yo

u're being measured against is, can I deliver a new capability or functionality in the cloud for the application or workload that I'm supporting? And so then you have the CFM team coming to you saying, "Well, you know, the boss over here says "that we need to go do this on doing that, "as part of the ownership, "we need to build a partnership." And you're like, "Yeah, but how do I ensure "that this is being prioritized?" That's where the allocation piece starts to play into it. If we can ensure

that your costs that are being incurred are flowed back to your bill, then we can help understand where that priority lies. Are you facing budget constraints in being able to deploy that new function work feature. Because if you are, great, this is where CFM starts to come into play because the CFM individuals can help you drive efficiency in the portfolio that creates room in the budget, that then allows you to ensure that at that original focus on driving functional performance is carried out

as part of your strategic goals. So that cost allocation piece, if you can partner with the CFM folks, or conversely, if the CFM individuals that are starting out on their journey can identify the right teams and get the bill flowing back to the right teams, that helps generate a lot of reason to make sure that folks are being brought to the table from a cost financial management perspective. All right, and so no matter where you're at on your journey, right, there's going to be a lot of differe

nt tools to help you. So if you're at the very low end of this spectrum here, let start, let's go out there. Let's get a copy of the invoice and the billing consult. Let's take a look at it, and start getting the first picture of where these costs are start going to, because maybe that's where you're at. You've defined the ownership. You understand it's important, or maybe you've seen a copy of the bill and you realize this (chuckles) this needs to be important. So you've started, you've got tha

t ownership in place, but you're looking at, where do I start building these partnerships? Let's go back to the invoice. Let's let the data lead us to that answer. And that's where you can start identifying those teams to start working with. And as you start understanding that billing mechanism, then we can go into cost export, to start establishing the cost allocation and saying, "Oh, well, now that we're starting to tag stuff, or now that we're starting to have cost associated to a particular

linked account, we can then have those costs start to flow back to the appropriate teams." And as the organization matures, you're gonna have a lot tougher questions being asked. That's where that detail that's provided in the cost and usage report, which is on the very far end of that spectrum provides that dexterity to be able to get the right reporting for your organization, to help meet those little unique challenges that start to really bubble up, as your CFM journey starts to really take o

ff. And there's also third party tools, so, you know, again, don't try to go this alone. What was mentioned at the very early part of this call is, you know, it takes a very wide ranging set of activities across a broad spectrum of tools to really make sure that your CFM journey is progressing as it needs to go. And that includes working with very trusted third parties through the AWS platform. So please keep those individuals and those teams in mind, as you get to these points, and you're like,

"Hey, this may be a roadblock "that we may not be able to solve internally." So on the next part, what we're gonna do is pass it back to Lauren. And she's gonna talk a little bit about the KPI structure, and why that's very, very important to this cost visibility piece, is step number four. - [Lauren] Thanks, Bryce. So the second and half of that cost visibility journey is establishing those efficiency KPIs in your organization. Going back to that, what does good look like slide, looking at tha

t purple line, what do I care about? What's my unit cost? So figured it would be helpful to throw in here what the heck is the KPI, and why should I care about it? So KPIs are measurable. They're meaningful to your business, and they can help you to measure what success looks like. So, one way to do that is work backwards from what you're trying to do, right, work backwards from that desired outcome. And how will I know if I'm being successful? These can be things like I'd mentioned before, cost

per customer cost, per transaction. Things like that, that you can say, "I'm working towards X goal," a KPI will help you get there. And they're really important in that organizational partnership piece. So yes, they provide great visibility into your data, but they also help to align stakeholders. And maybe they don't have a common language day to day, they're focused on two very different things. But those KPIs will say, these are those top priorities that we're working towards, right, this i

s what we consider are good to look like in our organization, so this is what we're striving towards. This will help you to set those targets, and then it'll also help you to see are my CFM activities that I'm doing on a day-to-day basis, improving this metric? And then if not, what levers do I have to pull so that we'll be driven towards our goal. So KPIs can help you on the visibility front, and then the organizational partnership front as well, to see your efficiency metrics over time. Now th

at we have those building blocks in place, we can go forward to the tools that AWS has to offer you to help along the way. By no means am I going through these one by one, I promise you, but this is a slide of all of the different tools that we have available that'll help you with your CFM journey. The purpose of this is just to show that there's a wide range available, and we're constantly adding to this list. So as that's evolving, you wanna make sure that you're cloud IQ, like we talked about

before, you're constantly evolving. You're checking out if there's something new that'll help you in your journey, and then exploring different options. If you are really liking one, you can stick with that. But if something else isn't quite working for you, there's a wide range of tools available for you to have. Getting more into our latter half of that six-step plan on step five, we're talking about Cost Optimization. So while there's hundreds of different levers that you can pull, I have li

sted out here three different ways that we can help you with AWS tooling to optimize and save. The first two here, Savings Plans Recommendations and Reserved Instance Recommendations, through AWS Cost Explorer, these will be presented to you. So you can toggle between your date range that you wanna look back on your usage for your commitment term. Are you looking at doing a one year versus a three year, and how do I wanna pay for this? So they're a commitment based. Do I wanna pay all upfront, p

artial, or no upfront? You can toggle between those choices to then get that customized recommendation for you. What this is looking for is where can I snap that chalk line in my usage to say, "This has been consistent over X period of time. "I know why I'm always gonna be using at least this amount. "I wanna save on that usage if I can, "'cause that's consistent." So you don't have to go find that opportunity. We have tools that can help you to pinpoint those, and you don't have to search for t

he results, they come right to you. That will help decrease that manual reporting piece. And it'll help you be more efficient in your usage and your time. On the right hand side, we have our Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Rightsizing Recommendations. Also available through AWS Cost Explorer. And that's gonna help you with your EC2 efficiency. So that's gonna identify things for you like Idle Instances or Rightsizing Recommendations. So between one and 40% CPU utilization, what do I have of instanc

e wise that lies between those two metrics? And what are my downsizing opportunities? That tool will also show you your estimated monthly savings, so you can start to prioritize. Again, I think the whole theme on this slide is, we do that work for you. These tools are working for you, so you don't have to manually go find those opportunities they're presented to you automatically. And as we get into our last step, the Cost Forecasting and Monitoring. We have tools like AWS Cost Explorer that can

help you with tracking your KPIs, having that baseline of where you're starting is always helpful from when you're looking to forecast. How do I know what good looks like? How do I know what my normal spend is? By using visibility tools like Cost Explorer, that can help you get your baseline, then you can forecast from there. So with this forecasting function, it'll help you plan out what your future could look like, and give you thresholds to you, so you can know what the high end and the low

end of that forecast could look like. As we move forward to the budget section, AWS Budgets has alerts and actions that you can take, so, as I had mentioned earlier on, you can be alerted when something is forecasted to go over your budget, or when it has actually reached your budget. That's really important to have a mix of those, so that you can be as proactive as possible in this variable spend environment, right? So you wanna make sure that you have those alerts set up, so that you can const

antly be taking actions to minimize that surprise, at the end of the month. You'll know what you're spending. With those AWS budget reports, that'll help you to see where are you in terms of your actual budget? So what are my actual versus goal? And those are available to you in a dashboard format. So you can constantly revisit those, and tailor, if you need to make any changes. Next steps here then are really all revolving around these six steps. Where are you at in your journey? So whether you

're just starting out, you're halfway through, or you have a plan of your own, using these six steps to then guide you and say, "Okay, I really need to focus in on these top two," right? Bryce and I both mentioned those top two priority areas, are really huge to have in place to make sure that you have a solid foundation for the rest of your CFM work. So use this as a playbook to just start iterate upon and really invest in your CFM journey, all of these will help set you up for success. And als

o know that AWS is always here for you. We have a wide range of different things that we can offer, such as our hands on workshops with your account teams. We have CFM peer connects that you can reach out to others that are in their own Cloud Financial Management journey, and see how they've defined success, and what steps they've come across. We have a wide range of things available, so feel free to reach out to your account team after this, to get started on that. And with that, we will open u

p for our Q&A session. - [Lisa] Thank you so much, guys. Sorry about that. I will go ahead and start with one of the questions we have out here, which is, how do we get started on the CFM implementation side? So where would you start for the implementation side? I think this question came in early, but it would be, you know, after you get past that ownership piece, where would your first step be for that? - [Bryce] Yeah, absolutely. After we get the ownership piece defined, and we start understa

nding a little bit about the portfolio, that's where I would start, is let's go out, let's take a look at the bill, and let's start understanding a little bit about the operating environment. What type of applications do we have operating in the cloud today? What type of value is this being delivered? You know, what is the context that you can bring to make it context aware? When you're looking at the cost and seeing, oh, okay, now understand why we're using EC2, or understand why S3, or RDS is

being used. Because it's in support of this broader strategy to deliver functions to the organization. What about you, Lauren? How would you answer that? - [Lauren] I think you hit the nail on the head there. I think that organizational partnership piece is all about cross education, right? You have these finance teams and technology teams that might not be of in the same day-to-day activities. So that cross organizational understanding, whether that's through KPIs or just educational offerings,

making sure they understand each other's worlds is huge. So if you come to a budgeting session and you're like, "I don't even know what EC2 is." That might be really hard to start budgeting for that. So making sure that you both have that common understanding will help make that a stronger organizational partnership, and then lead you through those like three to six steps where those tools then come into place. - [Lisa] Okay, and so, I have a follow up question. I don't have many services yet d

eployed on AWS. What can I use to proactively build with a budget in mind? So I think this is gonna be the pricing calculator, or depending on how big your migration is. Is there any other ideas you have for that? - [Bryce] I would definitely leverage the AWS calculator for that, for sure, 'cause you can build that out on a sort of workload basis, if that's what's appropriate to you. But you can also take a look holistically at the portfolio to say, "Generally speaking, if we need to deploy "X a

mount of compute into the environment, "what is that gonna look like?" So it's pretty flexible in it's capabilities. - [Lisa] Okay, and then the other question was along those same beginner lines is, do any of this cost visibility optimization and monitoring tools have a cost associated with them. - [Bryce] All right, Lauren, take a stab 'cause I know in general they don't, but I know that you have a lot of work with those. - [Lauren] There's always an exception to the rule, right? So in general

, the answer is no. A lot of these are available for you free of charge. If you do get more customized and start using things a little bit more advanced, as Bryce was talking through that matrix slide, of your visibility options. As you climb that ladder there, that's where you would start seeing those charges when you start using things like a third party billing tool, or you start using QuickSight dashboards, things are on the more mature side, that's where you'll start seeing those charges co

me in. - [Bryce] Yeah, so some good examples, like Cost Explorer's not going to cost you anything. - Unless you turn on - And there's some- - [Lisa] hourly granularity? - [Bryce] Yeah, exactly, and that's where- (chuckles) - It might cost you a dollar. (Lisa chuckles) - [Bryce] (chuckles) Yeah. - [Lisa] Depends on how many things you have. (laughs) - [Bryce] Absolutely, and very much to Lauren's point, it's really the extension capabilities that you get in there, but natively, right? So for exam

ple, - Mm-hmm. - [Bryce] Compute Optimizer, and that's gonna come up in one of these questions about EBS volumes, when we talk about the optimizer, that's a free tool. But if you start leveraging some of the latest capabilities that were announced at re:Invent most recently with being able to extend metric data to the 90-day mark, that's where I'm sort on a per resource, or account, or organizational level that you would then optionally start to encrypt costs. Anomal detection is free. AWS Budge

ts is free, but if you then start using some of the actions, and what those actions are carrying out, as part of the budgets, those would start incurring costs. So hopefully what what's being illustrated here is at a base level the tools will be free but as you start to extend them you may incur costs, depending on how you leverage them in your organization. - [Lisa] Yep, that makes sense. All right. So did you wanna take the EBS question then? How do I find out the utilization of EBS volume? (B

ryce laughs) Since you mentioned it? (Bryce chuckles) (Lisa laughs) - [Bryce] I feel like maybe the product team for Compute Optimizer wrote that question in here so they could glance. (Lisa laughs) That is the exact use case for Compute Optimizer. Yeah, and so Compute Optimizer will support four different services. It'll do your EC2 Volumes, or EC2 Instances. Let's just say your EBS Volumes, your auto scaling groups, and then your Lambda functions. It will cover those four services. As it relat

es to EBS Volumes, the beauty of the recommendations that are gonna be provided there is that it's gonna take a look at any restriction deployments, and tell you, "Hey these, or even if it is optimized, "here's where you can still save money." Good example is any gp2 volumes. Even if it is the right storage size, and you're utilizing it appropriately, as it relates to throughput and so forth, you can still save money potentially by going to gp3, and that tool outlines those. And in line, in that

recommendation for that volume, it will show you what is the performance of that volume over time? I think default is 14 days. And if you were to select, you know, hey, move to gp3, it'll show you what that marginal effect would have been had gp3 been in effect for that volume over that period of time. And sufficed to say, it'll do that across other recommendations as well within EBS volumes. - [Lisa] All right, I'm gonna go ahead and transition from that over to, we've got a lot of questions a

round tagging. So talking about tagging data quality, setting up an appropriate tagging structure, what is your advice on, you know, kind of monitoring or setting up your tagging? - [Bryce] All right, Lauren, you first. (Lisa laughs) - I'll start. I think tagging is awesome, right? But you don't wanna get to that point where you have so many tags that now they're all invaluable, right? So I would pick what's really important to you. Do I wanna know what project, what cost center, what person or

team this belongs to. Start small and you can expand upon those. But once you get to the point where everything's tagged with 300 tags, are those really valuable to you? So I would start thinking through of that start small approach and then expand as needed, but having those core tags will really help you to gain better insights from your data. - Mm-hmm. - Absolutely. And that's the, you know, more over to Lauren's point on that, that start simple, try to identify those opportunities where you

can put one tag on the resource that then can link out to a broader data set. And the reason why you reference that, for example, an app code, or some type of unique identifier for the application. If you could tag the resource, just the app code, but then in a separate data source reference how many users is that application? What type of risk assessment is that particular application? How old, or what is the retirement plan for that application? If you can do that, that will avoid you having a

tag on the information, on the resources, and as the organization experiences churn, or different org unit changes that happen all the time, by having that app code there, you could change your data repository as much as you want, without having to affect that ID code for that particular application. So that's a good example of, are there different mechanisms you can use to minimize that tag count? - [Lisa] Yep, so then what about tracking kind of that data quality? Like how do you, is there an

y tools or services that we have for helping with that? - [Bryce] Absolutely, so the first one that you can start to reference is tag editor. That's a good tool to be able to go out, and view at a per resource level potentially, which items have received the tag that you're looking for, or haven't, and it allows you to sort of also view the iterations of those potential tags. So for instance, if you have a tag key value pair such that you're gonna, in referencing back to that app ID, let's say t

hat's required. And so you have a key of app code, but you'll start to notice in the tag editor that the enumeration of the value is such that it's starting to skew beyond what you need from a data quality control. That's where tag editor can come in and start to help you identify those settings. You also have AWS Config where you can actually set a policy that says, it has to be tagged in these certain ways before a resource can be deployed. It can also measure drift from a known good standard.

AWS can do that, AWS Config can do that for you. And I'll also will reference a third tool, which is your curve file, your Cost and Usage Report. If you have taken that tag, and you've enabled it as a cost allocation tag in the billing console, what you will be able to do then is see in the Cost and Usage Report all of the resources that have been tagged, and what are the associated values. And then you can start to measure, are you moving in the right direction? And because it's in the curve f

ile, it now will also flow through to cost explore, where you can group by and filter based on those tag key and value pairs. - [Lisa] Yep, from a cross control method, I'm gonna add, I'm gonna stop, probably to let Lauren step in, but I think there's also another couple options. I know that in budgets, there's now a way to set a budget for things that aren't tagged. So you can, either find items that aren't tagged, and kind of get an idea of if that's getting outta control, and cost categories

to help kind of reduce some of that. If you've got the same thing named it, but sometimes it's capitalized, sometimes it's lowercase, sometimes there's different variations in there. You can use cost categories to kind of group those back together again, and get some of that control back. Anything else Lauren, you wanna add? - [Lauren] The only thing I was gonna add is that those control role pieces can go from, hey, you probably shouldn't do that, to you actually can't do this. So you have that

wide range (Lisa chuckles) of like, do I, how much of that guardrail do I wanna put up? How strict do I wanna be? So you can make it fit to what works in your org, but just know that there's a range there in terms of what you actually can shut down. - [Lisa] Awesome. All right. We've got some questions around KPIs, and around optimization scores. (sighs loudly) I'm trying to figure out what the best way to answer some of these. So what tool would I use to find an optimization score? What are so

me of your favorite KPIs? What if I don't have a unit cost structure in place? Where would I start? So what are some, I guess there's a bunch that are in that kind of same similar vein. - [Lauren] Great questions. I love KPIs. If you've ever heard me talk, you'll know, I love KPIs. I talk about them, I feel like, all day. So my favorite KPIs will start there. EC2 unit cost, storage unit cost, great efficiency metrics. Total EC2 spend divided by the total EC2 running hours will get you your unit

cost. That's something that you can track over time through data that you can pull through Cost Explorer, and show that trend in your efficiency. If you're noticing that that's creeping up, you'll look at your optimization levers and say, "Wait a second. What can I do here?" Do I need to look at Savings Plans, or my Rightsizing opportunities? Can I leverage spot anywhere?" So knowing what optimization levers go with that KPI is really important so that you can know based on the trend, if it's go

od, keep going on your path that you're going, but if it's not going the direction you wanna see, what can you do to bring that back down? We do have a new dashboard that's a 200 level, so a little bit more advanced that can help to automate part of that. So as you get going on your journey of doing some of this, maybe manually, that could be a part two. The KPI dashboard will have for you then all of these KPIs laid out, where you're at in each of them, and show a green reference. If you are ei

ther at or above that KPI metric you're striving towards, and then it'll be in regular coloring. I believe it's white text, if it's not reaching that threshold yet. So that would be one way that you can view that through your cost and usage report, but it is on the little more advanced side at that level 200. - [Lisa] Any other, what's there Bryce before I, - So there's another question? - try and take another question, no, go ahead. (Bryce chuckles) (Lisa laughs) - [Bryce] No, that's good. Ther

e's a question in here that Paul asked, it's says, what about ownership responsibility of the business mission, you know, with finance and IT? And to extend that hopefully that, well, why KPIs are so important is as those KPIs are being established, they should always map back to the IT strategy that's been laid out for the organization. What you don't want are scenarios where you're tracking efficiency, and so forth, in isolation of where the organization is headed. So to illustrate the point,

let's say that the organization has a stated goal to modernize the IT portfolio. And what I mean by that is that you have taken a concerted effort to evaluate and start deploying manage services so that your organization doesn't have to manage all the patching, and so forth, associated with your infrastructure. Or let's say that you're trying to adopt containerization because you want a lot of the agility, and IT capabilities that come with that. If that is the stated it goal, then the CFM entit

y, whoever that should be, should be mapping KPIs back to that stated IT strategy because you can see the cost. You can see, hey, over time, if I look at the different consumption level of compute, I'm noticing that our EC2 fleet is increasing, but as a percentage of that portfolio, you know, Lambda for instance, or Fargate consumption is not increasing. It's staying flat. Well, now we have a problem. And that KPI that was crafted by the CFM entity back to the IT journey, broadly to the portfoli

o, is where these now symbiotic relationships help identify early on that, hey, maybe we need to take a different track, something's not working in our journey so far. - [Lisa] Next one I was gonna ask is around what factors does forecasting take into account when estimating future costs? Do you guys know? It's mostly just based on your previous history, right? - Mm-hmm. - That's right. - It's gonna- - That's right. It's gonna be your previous consumption. - Okay. - Now, something that Lauren me

ntioned, and for those that didn't have the benefit, this is the second time we've been able to get this talk. And so in the the first chat Lauren mentioned a very good point, and Lauren, I'm gonna pass it back to you to flesh it out. But one of the things that Lauren mentioned is, allow your forecasting, and Lisa, you mentioned this too, allow your forecasting to be iterative. Don't expect that the first time you do a forecast, you're gonna get it right. You're gonna get it wrong a lot before y

ou start getting it right. And start bringing in contextual little bits to help you with the forecasting. So yes, natively through Cost Explorer, it's gonna be based on just purely your consumption pattern of what it sees. But if you know there is a big project coming up, don't put the blinders on, take the broad approach and understand what's going on contextually in the environment to help you in that forecast. - Yeah. - Great point. And I think to expand on that too, knowing what your norm is

, is important when you're starting to forecast, right? So if you're looking at the last three months, and you're like, I think this is kind of what my environment looks like for the last year, you'll wanna know that. And as Bryce mentioned, iterate upon it, you'll get better as you get going on it, the more times that you do it. But having that baseline of knowing where your ebbs and flows normally are at will be helped when you're forecasting, as opposed to just, I'm gonna look back at the las

t 30 days, and think that's maybe what I'll do the rest of the year. So definitely having that baseline, start tracking your KPIs, knowing where you're at now, to then help moving forward. - [Lisa] Yep, so similar to that, on that, talking about it, you know, not just monthly, but so is, the question is, is there a cost customization service that's available on a daily basis, not in a monthly basis? And I think, I mean, I'm not sure where that, what things are based on a monthly, but for the mos

t part, I think everything's looking at the most recent data, which is like the last day. Is there anything else from the optimization perspective that we take into consideration for that? - [Bryce] The question may be oriented around, it's either probably one or two things. And so my apologies to the person ask the question if this isn't the right context, but one context may be how often are the results refreshed. And the answer to that is at least on a 24-hour cycle for at least even Compute

Optimizer, and Cost Explorer. Trusted Advisor, at a minimum, is gonna be once a week. And then you can always go in there and refresh the results manually, to get a fresh update on what that is. Now, the other question, maybe the second fold is, how can I restrict the look-back period to just a day? Because I know that there was usage in my portfolio two weeks ago, that isn't what I need to map for. I'm looking at Rightsizing based on purely just what happened yesterday. In that case, what I wou

ld say is, let's go back to Compute Optimizer. And in there in those recommendations, you can set that window to a custom window, a default, I think is two weeks. But you and narrow that down, and then it will reconstruct that recommendation based on that narrow window that you set. - [Lisa] Okay, all right. I have a question around Savings Plans, as I'm purchasing Savings Plans, as our usage growths, I'm ending up with layers of plans with different end dates. How do I make this administration

easier. - [Lauren] Fun question. It's a good process that you're doing, right? Buying that baseline. That baseline's gonna shift as you grow, so adding them on top of another is a great practice. It just, as you know, adds to that administration piece. So tracking those end dates can be a little bit tricky. That's where some of our QuickSight dashboards come into play, they outline that for you, set alerts for that. It's just as you layer them, they all work in tandem with one another, but then

the operational burden increases. - [Bryce] Yeah, and absolutely. And Cost Explorer's your best friend in the utilization of the coverage reports, it's in the utilization reports. Maybe it's the coverage and can, but it tells you that end day, so you can filter and sort, and you can always see, hey, at the top of my list, when I look at this, what is the most important one that I need to be looking at based on expiration date? And that'll help you as well. - [Lisa] Yeah, and I've heard customers

that have also like standardized that I do it on a, to every other week process, so that they know it's always, I'm always reevaluating and kind of leveling up on a regular cadence. Other customers who are bigger might do it on a daily basis, depending on what they need to do. Other ones who are smaller, might do it on a quarterly basis to kind of get that management to a level that they can, they can decide on what's the right answer is. - [Bryce] Is that... - [Lisa] (clears throat) Let's see.

Are there multiple roles that will allow folks to see different parts of their bill without impacting other accounts? So how do you structure sort of that visibility, like how that customer culture part, what are some of the tools that can be used to share the right information with the right people, thoughts? - So you have a couple of options depending on what type of information you're wanting to restrict to. I would say always let's start with Cost Explorer. - Yeah. - Because the, that's a p

retty baseline access that can manage. And there's a document out there that we can follow up with that walks through the different permission level sets for Cost Explorer, because Cost Explorer access is also managed through the billing console access layer. So you can get very descriptive in what pieces and visibility people have with Cost Explorer. In general, - Mm-hmm. - [Bryce] read-only access is a base layer that everyone could have or should have. And then if the concern is not necessari

ly, if they have access to Cost Explorer, but potentially what type of information they have access to inside of Cost Explorer. What you can do is go into your preferences, in the billing console, and make that selection to say, hey, I don't want people to see certain credits, or certain other information being applied in Cost Explorer, and you can obfuscate that data on a linked account level. - [Lisa] Yeah. Let's see, We're getting into the last couple minutes here, so I... There's a couple qu

estions on certifications and trainings, and what kind of things would you recommend whether you're finance or IT, do you have any thoughts on, have some of those resources for folks? - [Lauren] Yes, I will say one, and then Bryce, I'm gonna kick it off to you, based on our last conversation. So the first one, I would definitely recommend the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam. That's gonna be a really great place to start, whether you're in finance or the IT section, just to have that baseli

ne understanding, and it'll really help with your billing and CFM journey. - [Bryce] Yeah, for sure. And I know that I will never do justice as well as Lisa does on this particular topic. (Lisa laughs) So she may have wrote the question, I don't know. - [Lisa] I did not write... There's like three in here. I swear I didn't write it. (Lisa laughs) - (laughs) Yeah. If you're looking for something that I would say is independent or agnostic, you know, cloud vendors, then FinOps Foundation, or the F

inOps organization is a really good starting place for that. They actually have a certification that you can go through from a FinOps perspective for cloud of financial management. Specifically speaking about AWS, it's gonna be hard to do any training and not touch on cost optimization, mainly because that is a pillar of our well architected framework, that cost optimization is. So it's gonna be hard to throw a stone in any direction and not get some level of education on it. - [Lisa] Yeah, and

so in the land of paid courses, there's also AWS Cloud Fund Management for Builders and AWS Cloud for Finance. So those are two paid classroom offerings. They're multi day, I think. The Builders one is two days, and the Finance one is three days, I think. And they kind of give you some of that as well, from that perspective. All right, I know you guys have access to the questions. Is there anything else that you're seeing in here that we wanna make sure we answer? Like there's multiple account m

anagement, and governance in here, changing your case tagging strategy. With so many services available, how do you pick (chuckles) where to start to make sure you're on the right path for a good implementation? Let's do that one. - [Bryce] So I have the benefit of knowing what is a follow on activity from this presentation. There will be a blog post that's released that links back, and that's actually one of the top three questions that we see from customers is, "Okay, okay, okay. Yes, I unders

tand, CFM is important. Yes. I understand that there's a path. I literally need help. Like where do I start?" I would say start at the smallest level that you have domain over, or control over. If that's a team level, start with a team, practice going through those steps of getting a manager involved and getting their buy-in that cloud management is important, practice identifying that manager's cost in your portfolio, practice going and working with the engineers to ensure that they can underst

and the cost and how to start rightsizing optimizing the portfolio, and so forth. From those experiences build on it, stretch larger in the portfolio, stretch wider, expand that influence that you have within your domain, or your world. - [Lisa] Yeah, and I always say, start with Cost Explorer, it's free. (laughs) You can start there, (Lauren chuckles) start to figure out where you, and then I always say like, what got you on this journey? Like, what was the thing that started you off here? So w

as it, I got a scary bill, and I wanted to, and scary, and I see questions all over the place. Sometimes I see scary as a dollar. Sometimes I see scary as a bigger number, or whatever scary is to you. I got a bill, I wasn't expecting. If your first question is that, figuring out where that usage is, what led to that cost that you weren't expecting, and what can you put in place? So we've got tools like cost anomaly detection that can kind of help you with those spikes or budgets that can help yo

u with seeing when things are not in control, if that's where you need to be. Figuring out how do you set up a budget so that you can good advance notice when you're forecasted to go over what you see as reasonable. - Mm-hmm. (chuckles) - But if you were really just wanna make sure that people are making better choices as they make in architecture, then how do you share what the cost of things are to back to those application teams? That's where I would start. So it's really about where, what pr

oblem are you trying to solve? Because CFM is, you can get super complicated, but you should try and make it as simple - (chuckles) Totally. - [Lisa] as you can to solve the problems you have. - Mm-hmm. - So don't add complexity just for fun. (Bryce laughs) (Lisa laughs) I know, I- - Yeah, thank you. - [Lisa] I totally will go down the complex route just because I can, but, you know, start simple, stay as simple as you can. - [Bryce] Yes, absolutely. Your future self will thank your former self.

(chuckles) - [Lisa] Yep. (chuckles) So true. All right, last, I'm gonna ask you guys to put your last thoughts before we go ahead and close out here today. Any last thoughts? - I can and he can- - I have a lot. (Lauren laughs) (Lisa laughs) - Yes. - Go ahead, Lauren. - [Lauren] I was just gonna say, CFM is a journey, so think of it as that, right? Everyone's gonna be at a different space, in a different spot on that journey, so just starting where you're at, figuring out what your main pain poi

nts are, I think is a really great starting point because it can get really overwhelming. And as Lisa mentioned, it can get really complex, so start simple, figure out where your pain points are, and go from there. And use those steps that we had listed out today as kind of that playbook, but make it your own. So iterate upon it, change things as you see fit, but really keeping it simple and starting where you're at. - [Lisa] Mm-hmm. - [Bryce] Yeah, don't be discouraged. Please, don't be discour

aged. Recognize you're not in this journey alone. AWS, we're here to help. You know, go back to these slides, see what those resources are for you to pull on. We had an immense amount of attendees on this call, and what I mentioned as to represent that clearly you're not alone, and we want to help you, we want to see you be successful. So if you're starting out and you face a setback, understand everyone does that. Even in my own professional experience, as being a Cloud Cost manager prior to AW

S, there were nights where we were challenged. We didn't know how we were gonna get around a organization that was blocking us. But start small and get back at it, as much as you can. - [Lisa] Mm-hmm. Yep. So I think that there's one more slide in here. Lauren, I think there's a resources slide. When you guys get the deck tomorrow and the recording that's out there, we'll be out there as well. There are some resources that we can point to, to help you. Even my cat wants to get involved in this c

onversation apparently. So it's a marathon. It's a marathon, not a sprint. Think about it from a, how am I gonna make decisions based on what I'm doing. And thank you so much, Lauren and Bryce for being here today, and thank you all of you guys for being here today. You'll get a survey as you leave, as well as an email later today, but then you'll get that, the presentation tomorrow, and the recording will be out there, if you wanna refer back to it, but also rely on our AWS team. We're all here

to help you, so if you've got an account team, reach out to them. There's some forums out there for asking questions as well under repost, and there's resources under our blogs, our documentation, and we're here to help. So thank you so much for being here, and I look forward to seeing you on your next stage of the journey, thanks, guys. - Thank you. - Bye. - [Lauren] Thank you.