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Anirban Ghoshal
Senior Writer

AWS launches Cost Optimization Hub to help curb cloud expenses

News
Nov 28, 20233 mins
Amazon re:Invent

At its ongoing re:Invent 2023 conference, the cloud service provider introduced several new and free updates that are expected to help enterprises optimize their AWS costs.

AWS Cost Optimization Hub
Credit: AWS

As part of its ongoing efforts to help its enterprise customers rein in cloud costs, AWS on Monday announced several new updates at its re:Invent 2023 conference.

The new updates include a new AWS Billing and Cost Management feature, dubbed AWS Cost Optimization Hub, which makes it easy for enterprises to identify, filter, aggregate, and quantify savings for AWS cost optimization recommendations.

The new Hub, according to the cloud services provider, gathers all cost-optimizing recommended actions across AWS Cloud Financial Management (CFM) services, including AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Compute Optimizer, in one place.

It incorporates customer-specific pricing and discounts into these recommendations, and it deduplicates findings and savings to give a consolidated view of an enterprise’s cost optimization opportunities, AWS added.

The feature is likely to help FinOps or infrastructure management teams understand cost optimization opportunities.

Cost optimization within AWS Billing

The new Hub can be enabled from inside the AWS Billing and Cost Management Console, but takes 24 hours to recommend any actions, AWS said, adding that the recommendations are refreshed every 24 hours.

These recommendations include six types of actions — Stop, Rightsize, Upgrade, Graviton migration, Purchase Savings Plans, and Purchase Reserved Instances.

Further, the Hub shows the estimated monthly savings along with any recommendation, the cloud service provider said, adding that enterprises can filter the recommendations by AWS account and AWS Region among other categories.

Also, the recommendations can be found via a query through AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) and AWS SDKs.

The new Cost Optimization Hub has been made generally available at no additional cost for all enterprise customers globally.

In addition to the new Hub, AWS has released a new API that allows enterprises to check the usage of their AWS Free Tier programmatically.

Enterprises can use the API directly with the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) or integrate it into an application with the AWS SDKs, the company said.

The cloud services provider also announced the general availability of Data Exports, which too is a feature baked into the Billing and Cost Management Console.

This feature, according to AWS, enables enterprises to create exports of billing and cost management data using SQL column selections and row filters to select the data they want to receive.

“Exports are delivered on a recurring basis to an Amazon S3 bucket for use with business intelligence or data analytics solutions,” the company wrote in a blog post.