Cost-Aware Processes

Implement cost awareness in your organizational processes: Cost awareness must be implemented in new and existing organizational processes. It is recommended to re-use and modify existing processes where possible—this minimizes the impact to agility and velocity. The following recommendations will help implement cost awareness in your workload:

• Ensure that change management includes a cost measurement to quantify the financial impact of your changes. This helps pro-actively address cost-related concerns and highlight cost savings.

• Ensure that cost optimization is a core component of your operating capabilities. For example, you can leverage existing incident management processes to investigate and identify root cause for cost and usage anomalies (cost overages).

• Accelerate cost savings and business value realization through automation or tooling. When thinking about the cost of implementing, frame the conversation to include an ROI component to justify the investment of time or money.

• Extend existing training and development programs to include cost aware training throughout your organization. It is recommended that this includes continuous training and certification. This will build an organization that is capable of self-managing cost and usage.

Report and notify on cost and usage optimization: You must regularly report on cost and usage optimization within your organization. You can implement dedicated sessions to cost optimization, or include cost optimization in your regular operational reporting cycles for your workloads. AWS Cost Explorer provides dashboards and reports. You can track your progress of cost and usage against configured budgets with AWS Budgets Reports.

You can also use Amazon QuickSight with Cost and Usage Report (CUR) data, to provide highly customized reporting with more granular data.

Implement notifications on cost and usage to ensure that changes in cost and usage can be acted upon quickly. AWS Budgets allows you to provide notifications against targets. We recommend configuring notifications on both increases and decreases, and in both cost and usage for workloads.

Monitor cost and usage proactively: It is recommended to monitor cost and usage proactively within your organization, not just when there are exceptions or anomalies. Highly visible dashboards throughout your office or work environment ensure that key people have access to the information they need, and indicate the organization’s focus on cost optimization. Visible dashboards enable you to actively promote successful outcomes and implement them throughout your organization.